THE INSIDER: IEKELIENE STANGE

The face of Marc Jacobs and Sonia Rykiel reveals her new role: gallerina.

We swear on a stack of Polaroid instants (and that film is now hard to find...) that our favorite wispy Dutch model, Iekeliene Stange, isn’t quitting the runway.

But with two well-received photo exhibitions under her belt (where she's the photographer, and not the girl on film), “Iek” doesn't need the catwalk to get headlines anymore.

We sat down with the 24-year-old to discuss her new exhibit.

How’d you start with photography?
I studied multimedia design, and I moved to London from Holland to study photography. I also have a boyfriend [photographer Nicholas Lawn] who studied engineering before photography. He’s very technical, so whenever I have any questions, he helps me with all that.

You’ve exhibited your Polaroids in Berlin and now London. What are some of the best things about the work you’ve shown?  One of my favorite photos has just this little house, with my boyfriend on top of it. It’s really bizarre and surreal. He kind of looks like a giant, you know?
The exhibitions are just like these little windows, and I wanted to have the picture and nothing edited about it. Then you actually have to walk up to it and look closer.

Your London exhibition, Umfeld, showed a mixture of your photography and paintings from the Dutch artist Victor De Bie. How did you two start working together?  He’s such an old friend of mine. We’re kind of on the same level of our little imaginary world. We planned a lot over Skype because he lives in Holland, and I’m in London, and I’ve been away modeling. Victor always gets really enthusiastic and he starts going, “Should we do this, should we do that?” One idea was to make a 3-D pony that people could actually sit on, but it just didn’t happen. I knitted a patchwork horse for the wall instead, almost like a child would have done it.

What comes next from here?  I want to get into more photojournalism. My biggest inspiration is those old-school Magnum photographers, where they were just really passionate about it. I think that’s what I aspire to do. I’ve just been reading the Magnum Photos biography. It makes me really passionate, and I’m like, “Those photographers just don’t exist anymore, who really love to go in there and show the world what’s going on.” Now with television and everything, you have these different types of media that are taking away the interest in photography. The quality is really missing, and also with digital photography, they just don’t take the time anymore. [Before] they actually changed people’s opinions of what was going on. I think it’s amazing that you can use photography to do that. People now look at these pictures of dying children in Africa, and they’re like, “OK, I’ve seen this, I’ve seen that.”

Where do you imagine photography taking you?  Do you know the Sámi people in the north of Scandinavia? They’re the people that live with the reindeer, and they’re basically the only indigenous people left in Europe. They’re kind of getting extinct at the moment because their traditions are being washed away, and they’re being taken over by the rest of the culture in Norway and the north of Scandinavia. Their land [possibly] is going to become a protected nature preserve - the government is working on it at the moment…I think I’ll have to get on to this soon because in a few years, there’s not going to be much left of their culture.

With modeling, you’ve done plenty of editorial work, so you must have been to some good locations for photography. Does any place stick out?  I’ve been on jobs that were amazing. I went on a trip to Papua New Guinea and my boyfriend came as well. It was an amazing experience. I know people who have traveled, flown over several times, and they didn’t get allowance to get into the country. We were shooting in the middle of nowhere with these tribal men. You go there with this fashion team, you enter this place, where people are still so unaware of what else is going on in the world…It’s quite surreal.

Not a bad way to find motivation for your work.
When you get to go on those sorts of trips, you just think, “I’m really fortunate.” It makes you have lots of ideas, and you really start thinking.
--JILL HILBRENNER

www.iekeleinestange.com



This story was published on April 10, 2009.