In the early years of MTV, music videos operated as experimental spaces where structuralist and avant-garde film ideas entered popular culture. Emphasis shifted from narrative to repetition, framing, and gesture, with split screens and loops foregrounding the mechanics of the image itself. I was thinking about this lineage while shooting the Montage sequence with Grace Mahary, particularly in the repeated gesture of her closing the book and the split-screen movement against the white backdrop. The camera reflects on its own construction as much as it records performance.
By the 1980s, figures like Madonna, shaped in part by Maripol’s visual world, translated underground art strategies into mass media. Maripol’s movement between downtown art, fashion, and MTV demonstrated how experimental form could circulate commercially without losing its charge. Shooting Grace in Maripol’s Los Angeles studio situates that history in the present. Working with hair stylist Charlie Le Mindu further sharpened this awareness, where hair styling at that level functions as an exacting craft and visual language in its own right, materially shaping the image without needing to be framed strictly as art.
Today’s fashion films and social media visuals inherit this language almost by default. Looping gestures, fractured compositions, and self-aware framing define contemporary branding. In shooting this video of Grace for release with L’Officiel, I’m less interested in nostalgia than in tracking how these formal strategies continue to circulate. Grace closes the book on camera, twice, but the gesture reads less as an ending than a pause, a conscious mark in an ongoing story that continues to unfold.
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