THE HOURGLASS
Artist Background:
Cass Bird
October 18, 2013
One of Cass's first shots of Daria Werbowy, taken for Dossier Magazine in 2010.
Behind the scenes, Cass capturing a shot from a helicopter in the Swiss Alps. Over 14,000 ft above sea level. On a shoot for JCrew, August 2013.
Jessica Chastain for the cover of T Magazine, 2012.
Behind the scenes for JCrew's Holiday 2012 catalog. Cass taking photos of snowboarders doing flips off a mountain in Chile, photo taken in August 2012.
At the airport in the Bahamas. Cass scouting a plane on a shoot for Bergdorf Goodman Resort Magazine in September 2011.
Jay-Z for T Magazine, 2012. Photographed at Barclays center before it was finished.
Shaun White photographed for GQ in 2006.
Katy Perry, 2013. Photograph taken to promote the release of her new album, Prism.
Behind the scenes, Cass doing a backflip off the sailboat in St. Barts. On a break during a shoot for T Magazine with Daria Werbowy.
Rewilding, 2012.
There is something different about Cass Bird’s pictures—you can feel it instantly—but it can be hard to put a finger on what exactly the difference is. It seems the subjects, often women, and often the most of-the-moment models or Hollywood stars, are simply responding differently to the taker of the photograph than they normally do. They seem not to be playing the sexpot in the conventional sense, and to be engaging instead in an interaction more playful, and perhaps more authentic. Look at enough of Bird’s pictures and you begin to realize what you are looking at is a female gaze, and how very rare this point of view is in celebrity portraiture.
So it makes perfect sense that Bird, who had dabbled in photography before attending Smith College, traces the origins of her sensibility to her days at that female-only, liberal-arts institution. “I think that’s really where it began for me,” Bird says. “It’s where I began understanding that aesthetics are secondary to curiosity and the individual expression of identity.”
Bird’s refreshing eye is regularly cast on fashion’s biggest stars — she has an ongoing and particularly dynamic collaboration with the model Daria Werbowy — but in the summers of 2009 and 2010, on her own time, she turned it on a group of young women less accustomed to posing in front of a camera. Bird cast these women, which included a couple of her interns as well as someone she met on the street, for their adaptable notions of femininity, and brought them to Sassafrass, Tennessee, to take the portraits which now make up her 2012 book, “Rewilding.”
“For me it’s a very modern way of expressing femininity,” Bird says of the pictures in the hardcover volume, which depict the group of androgynous-looking women climbing trees, forming human pyramids and just generally rollicking in their rural environment. “Whereas in the past to be masculine-presenting was interpreted as a rejection of femininity, I was able to see that femininity can be more inclusive than that.”
For Whisper Editions, Bird is offering an exclusive print of the black-and-white image that graces the cover of “Rewilding.” The photograph, “Julie in Braids,” shows the back of a woman who has her hair in very girly braids, and a tuft of hair peaking out of her right armpit — the subtle, clever mixing of the traditionally female and the traditionally male that is a hallmark of Bird’s work. “I did the braids going down her back,” Bird says.
Shop Bird's edition for Whisper here.