BlackFlash Magazine

Message Pictures: Adventures in Reading Images, Part One

The following is the first in a series of three texts that focus on the pleasures and frustrations, the rewards and dangers, of reading images and imagining readings. Part Two | Part Three By Michael Davidge I’ve always loved reading. Okay, so maybe I didn’t come out of the womb holding a New Yorker magazine, [...]

Fall 2011 Issue 29.1

Fall 29.1 Canada $8.00 USA $13.00 International $20.00 Features: Reindeer Project by Scarlett Hooft Graafland 34 Transmissions: Charles Stankievech and the North by Scott Rogers Young Hearts Be Free: The works of Justin Waddell by Tatiana Mellema Departments: Of Interest: New Media: Robert Hengeveld by John G. Hampton My Best Shot: Jeff Thomas Column: Message [...]

Summer 2011 Issue 28.3

Death And the Middle Finger: David Poolman and Steven Shearer

In the society pages of the Summer 2008 issue of Interview, there is one incongruous image that seems perfectly apt: amongst the smiling ingénues in low-cut gowns stands a grizzled old man, his expression somewhere between automated hatred and besotted ambivalence, his head wrapped in white do-rag topped with a fedora. The man holds his left hand aloft, fingers curled back in a fist, excepting his middle finger, which juts into the foreground, the middle fingernail painted pale blue. It is, of course, Keith Richards, guitarist, snapped by the photographer Patrick McMullan at an IMAX screening of the Rolling Stone’s latest concert film, on March 30, 2008. The caption for this particular photograph reads (underlined in the magazine for emphasis), “Keith Richards’ middle finger still works.”