With the decline of print journalism and the rise of web-based "zines", it's no surprise that technology is finding its way into our favorite fashion editorials, changing not only the way they're viewed but how we think of the photographic medium.
Artists Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader -- collectively known as "Reed and Rader" -- are in the business of creating "new realities," incorporating animation and interactivity into online-only spreads. Blurring the line between real life and the static photograph, their animated images are a bit like watching fashion come joltingly, even frighteningly to life. Pamela explains that "screens are taking over as the main place for content consumption ... [and] technology has the advantage over print of being able to show motion and with speakers, use sound. Why show images on a screen still? Technology now allows for those images that once could only be still on paper to now interact and become alive."
Both hailing from Smalltown, USA -- Reed from Pennsylvania and Rader from Ohio -- the pair met in 2002 on a "pre-Facebook social networking site" and soon learned they both attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and actually both lived in the same building. Their intense collaborative process has turned them into "one person with four hands." As the duo put it: "We pre-produce together, we direct on set together, we post-produce together."
A shared taste for the surreal often yields interesting on-set results, as in a recent incident when a model was asked to wear a Star Wars' Tusken raider mask on a beach shoot. "A young teenage boy rode by on his bicycle pumping one first in the air yelling 'sand person!' It made our week."
View Reed + Rader's psychedelic animated fashion shoots at their website, www.reedandrader.com.
