Eva Mendes: 21st Century Latina Bombshell

original posting 5/26/2008 | update below: 1/13/2011

Were the shade of our dear departed guru of deconstruction Jacques Derrida be asked to comment on the dynamics of the Latina femme fatale, he might well answer with one of his "always already" lines as in "the liminal space of the Latina feminine is always already a return, a resurrection, a renaissance."

Hitting the image above will take you to Steven Meisel's Italian VOGUE site; hit Archivio and then Maggio 2008 for the Mendes/Meisel collaboration.

This came to mind as I stumbled upon Vogue Italy's recent photoshoot with the Los Angeles-raised, Cuban-American actor Eva Mendes; click either of the two larger images above to be transported to an eyegienically sublime portfolio of Mendes lensed by Steven Meisel. Meisel's work here is striking, Mendes' almost sinematically profound--collaborating, the two have concocted next-gen "motion pictures," black and white and color still photography that pans and darts across your computer screen (the tossed shoe in the initial photograph is worthy of Orson Welles). Think the Ken Burns effect but with Helmut Newton's eye, or Humbert Humbert's or Man Ray's or Diane Arbus'... your call.

Meisel's work is glossed here in the NYTimes and here, another striking shoot, of post-operative models in rehab. Several Meisel collections are archived here at Art and Commerce.

source

Update, January 13, 2011

Mendes toys around with her celebrity in an utterly postmodern video from Funny or Die...

postscript.... I just ran across a nice piece from the Nordicom Review that includes lucid insights on elements of Meisel's work.