The photographs in Rachel Hulin’s Flying Series, in which her baby Henry appears to float in the landscape, have a dreamy, almost magical quality to them, but they started in the most pedestrian of ways: Hulin was kind of bored. A new mom who’d recently relocated from Brooklyn to Providence, Rhode Island, she says, “I was looking for a project to sink my teeth into while I was home with Henry when he was so little. I was trying figure out motherhood and the whole thing seemed so weird to me.” A former blogger and photo editor who’d spent the better part of nine years constantly looking at pictures, she was aware of a genre of photos called “floaters” and was interested in the figure in landscape as well — “finding a beautiful scene and somehow making it more personal by putting someone you love in it,” she says. She never expected to do a floating series of her own, but once she did one photo, she was kind of hooked. “Partly it was being in a new city, trying to find special places with a baby,” she says. “It was a nice thing to do together. It became what we did in the afternoons.”
Hulin first stuck close to home; she lives with her husband and Henry in a 100-year-old former seltzer bottle factory, which offered plenty of fodder. But eventually they ventured out into the world: the RISD library, a barn in Vermont, her in-laws’ house in Long Island. Though she was typically reluctant to post pictures of Henry on Facebook, she began uploading them to gauge crowd reaction. Her friends went nuts over them; one of those friends just happened to be a photo editor at Time. After they went up on Time’s photography blog, the photos went completely viral. (A conversation by phone with Kathie Lee and Hoda Kotb on The Today Show was one of the more surreal moments.)
“The pictures went up on Time at a point when the project was still very new to me and very partially formed,” says Hulin. “I didn’t want Henry to become an internet meme. It felt sad to me that it would become a hit on Buzzfeed and nothing more. So I started to think about how I could use the Internet attention for good and not evil. I pitched it around a little bit, and PowerHouse Books was into the idea of making it into a children’s book. I may have stopped making them or made a few more at that point but instead the project took on this whole new life.”
Flying Henry came out earlier this year, and in this slideshow, Hulin shows us how she took it from a personal project to a children’s book that’s already sold out its first run. Of the response she’s had, she says, “Kids liked it; they were super into the narrative and totally accepted that a baby would fly. One kid asked Henry how he made his daddy disappear, which I thought was very high concept.” As for her own son, she says: “Henry totally doesn’t ask for the book. I think he’s more into schoolbuses.”
“This hotel-room picture was the first seed of an idea for a flying project. Henry was about six months old, and I was shooting a wedding in Princeton, New Jersey. I saw my husband flying Henry and it was graphically very interesting to me. I started contemplating a project where I’d remove the parent. This one was actually sort of eerie. I thought maybe it would be this spooky series, which it may have turned into had it not become a children’s book.”
“I spent nine years as a photo editor, so I was looking at pictures constantly. I had colloquially always been interested in pictures that people call ‘floaters.’ This one is by Julia Fullerton-Batten.”
Hulin setting up the shot.
“White Hall is one of the first images I made of Henry, and still I think fairly successful. He was at an excellent flying age, and he held his form very nicely. It was easy to get this shot.”
“Bricks was also shot in my house at the beginning of the project. My mom helped out on this one, wearing black gloves for easy post-production.”
“This was an early attempt at flying in the park, but it ended up looking more like Henry was falling. I nixed it before I even finished the retouching.”
“Flight of the Scholar was done very quickly; for some reason I didn’t think the library would understand the project, so we were in and out in five minutes.”
“I love this one. Henry’s form is so balletic here.”
“After the Time article ran, a lot of blogs picked up the images. One interesting story likened the process to a genre of 19th-century tintypes that were called “hidden mother portraits,” where the mother would hide under a cloak with the baby on her lap, in order to get the baby to sit for a long exposure. I thought that was flattering and one of the more interesting critiques of the work.”
“People started calling me a mommy photographer, and it was strange to be reduced to that. This was the first thing I’d ever done with a child in it, never mind my own kid. So I really made an effort to make each one of them feel well-crafted and fine art-y. Some of the book adventure ones feel more commercial, but this Umbrella shot works really well for the book and it’s also a beautiful image.”
“Swan was also shot specifically for the book. It looks spectacular large.”
The set-up for the book’s cover image: “This is a hill near my parents’ house in rural Connecticut. It’s on the University of Connecticut’s agriculture campus, so there are cows all around. It’s this magical spot that feels like it could be in the farmlands of Idaho. I’ve always made pictures there; I have an example of my mom with a picnic blanket that I took maybe eight years ago. That picture stuck in my mind, and it was pleasant to recreate it. She was my assistant that day. She flew the blanket and I flew Henry.”
“Henry was getting older at this point. We would have to do 30-second shoots, like three images and if it didn’t work, too bad. You can see in the cape image, he looks crabby. When he was little, you’d hold him up and he was automatically in flying position. But at this point he was a little boy and it was really hard to get him to look like he was calmly flying.”
“But I liked the pose we found for Tractor Flight. Henry adores trucks and buses and tractors and backhoes, so he liked making this one.”
“Here is my storyboard for Flying Henry. It wasn’t easy to nail down the narrative. The book needed to have a climax — like what tells your character to have a moment in his life where he changes course. Powerhouse wanted it to be scary but not too scary.”
“I took a weird scary picture in the forest, and I tried one outside in the middle of the night. I couldn’t shoot Henry after dark, so I tried to paste him on. It was very unsuccessful. This beach image was a sketch for the scary image — I was trying to do a Hitchcock birds thing, but it didn’t really work for me. Sometimes sticking him flying in the landscape looked really awkward and pasted on even if it wasn’t.”
“We ended up with pumpkins instead for the scary concept.”
“The final image in the book is several babies flying in formation. Henry finds buddies to fly with! It was taken at my husband’s 35th birthday party, where many babies were in attendance. Shockingly, one of the easier images to make. Those babies were a little younger, and they were genius flyers.”
“Always listen to your mother” isn’t exactly the kind of central tenet they teach you at Harvard Business School. But for Emily Sugihara, the California-raised, Brooklyn-based designer behind the reusable bag line Baggu, it’s a piece of advice that’s been invaluable to the brand’s runaway success since its founding in 2007. Back then Sugihara was a Parsons grad working as an assistant designer at J. Crew, just coming to realize that a corporate job wasn’t her calling. “As a kid, I was very entrepreneurial, and I always knew I wanted to have my own company,” she says. At home over Christmas break one year, Sugihara and her mother began talking about making a line of reusable shopping bags. Her mom was “sort of a treehugger” and an artist in her own right — an expert seamstress who learned to sew making her own clothes as a kid in rural Michigan — and Sugihara was a die-hard New Yorker-in-training, sporting fingers turned purple each week as she lugged home bags full of groceries. Together they came up with a bag that’s almost exactly like the original ripstop nylon Baggu that sells today: long handles that fit comfortably over the shoulder, gussets along the bottom that allow things like milk and eggs to stack, and a single, double-reinforced seam that’s the result, Sugihara says, of her mother’s “sewing genius.”
If you're the kind of person who pays attention to Pinterest, you may have spotted the playful image above making the rounds there as of late. But we can pretty much guarantee you don't know the story of the two Mexican artists who created it — and the blog it's pulled from, Archivo Diario — which turns out to be one of the more amusing tales we've heard in awhile. We were lucky enough to meet Marco Rountree Cruz and Melinda Santillan at a party thrown this fall by Jennilee Marigomen of 01 Magazine, and we decided to keep in touch with the Mexico City–based couple, who launched Archivo Diario three months ago both as a way to force themselves to create something new every day and to try their hand at working together (Cruz being a successful installation artist and Santillan more of an art director). But when we dug a little deeper, we found out that the endeavor was technically their second collaboration, and was in many ways a direct reaction to the failure of first: an elaborate script for a stylized telenovela that they dreamed of actually producing, but that has since languished in their desk drawer. We were so impressed by the couple's boundless creative ambitions — just wait until you hear about the crazy project Cruz is working on now — that we begged them to tell us everything
In a recent interview with the New York–based photographer Tim Barber, who's known for his edgy portraits of artists and other downtown tastemakers, the folks behind the Urban Outfitters blog evoked some rather unconventional subject matter: UFOs, ghosts, chicken carcasses. Credit the fact that not only did the former Vice Magazine photo editor shoot UO's playful new spring catalog, but he's also currently judging a Weirdest Photo Contest for the retail giant. Of course, in his work with clients like Nike, Woolrich Woolen Mills, T magazine, Italian Vogue, and Stella McCartney, Barber has displayed a more serious side as well. We wanted to show both of them, so we went through his portfolio and chose some new photos to accompany our excerpt from the UO interview — instances where Barber has documented the private spaces of creatives, a la Sight Unseen.
