For Harmony Korine, Florida is a place of two extremes. “I love the way it looks. The way it feels. It’s such a strange place that seems to exist completely on its own,” the director told Vice. “I just kind of, I can’t put my finger on it. It’s the characters and how it’s just such an extreme place. And at the same time it’s tropical and tranquil.” It’s this clash of cultures; the mix of high and low, and really fucked up shit that only happens in Florida that made him want to make it his home in 2015. Moving between Palm Beach and Miami, where he now lives and keeps a studio in the Design District, has become a creature of the Sunshine State, and his past decade of work attests to that. His recent trilogy of Florida-set films are a homage to the type of extreme lifestyles that coexist in the region. Spring Breakers, released in 2012, reflects reckless adolescence, depicting the Tampa coastline as a debauched paradise of eternal youth and shameless criminality. The Beach Bum (2019), follows a scumbag troubadour (Matthew McConaughey) who should’ve left the Parrothead party boat a while ago as he gallivants around the Florida Keys. The latest in his Florida saga, Aggro Dr1ft (2023), isn’t exactly a film, and it’s not exactly in Florida. Soaked in lurid colors thanks to a couple of sophisticated infrared cameras, Miami — its skyscrapers and causeways, its boats and bayside mansions and slums — becomes the Broken City, a “tropical dystopia” where gangs and assassins (one played by Travis Scott) do battle with demon lords and guns are as plentiful as big-booty bitches. Florida’s tropical hues and glorious weirdos have seeped into Korine’s wider artistic practises. From his acid-hued paintings, to surreal photography projects and music videos, these hallucinatory works, like his films, blur the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ in ways that simultaneously attract and repel viewers with their hypnotic, otherworldly atmosphere.
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