About
American born Justice Howard has become something of an enigma in art circles around this globe of ours. To call Justice Howard merely a ‘photographer’ would be a gross oversimplificaion. It would seem more fitting referring to her as a “visionary aesthetician”. An artist who visualizes what the camera documents. The body of work she has created in her short career consists of an aesthetic architecture that enhances the female form and the personnas of the human condition in all its kaleidoscopic temperaments.
Artistically articulate, Justice Howard’s work has attained greatness parallel to Herb Ritts & Annie Liebowitz. She is featured on websites alongside Scavullo & Mapplethorpe. While being evocative, and often confronting, Justice Howard’s work has always been precocious. Internationally renowned in over 25 countries Justice Howard’s client list reads like an “artistic wish list”. Marilyn Manson, Siegfried & Roy, Dave Navarro, Waylon Jennings, Rich Little, Blue Man Group, Julie Strain and dozens of Playboy Playmates & Penthouse Pets have been captured by her lens. The visual author of literally hundreds of print features and dozens of anthologies, Howard has documented her aesthetics in hundreds of magazines and just as many highly successful art gallery exhibitions as well as hardcover coffeetable books. Justice Howard’s photo embrace has outgrown that of her contemporaries as well as any “genre label”.
After all is said and done, it seems far more appropriate to refer to her as a ‘temporal artiste’. She captures the vision we all imagine but fail to actualize in this hurried labyrinth called life.
Looking for Justice
"My favourite thing is to go where I have never gone.” Diane Arbus, photographer
Justice Howard knows where she’s been and where she doesn’t want to be. Her progress as a world-class photographer came after being side-tracked, with time spent traveling down a road to nowhere in particular.
Howard exemplifies a red-headed rebel with Hell’s Angels for riding buddies with the curvaceous figure of a cartoon action heroine It was author/poet Charles Bukowski who asked what she intended on doing with her life.
“I said, ‘Oh, I’m writing and modeling etc. etc. etc.’” she remembers. “And Bukowski told her in no uncertain terms ‘No, no. You have to ride one horse…’
“I listened to him so then right after that, I got serious about my photography.”
Later, at an exhibition of her work in Los Angeles, she recalls, “somebody came up and said, ‘Oh, you’re the fetish photographer…’
“They were locking me into this slot and I had to jump out as quickly as possible. I did my best to immediately run away from that. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years – showing people I’m much more than that.”
Likened to Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and Arbus, Howard gladly acknowledges their influences. Her models are edge-dwellers or famous, or both, and always photographed within the context of visions that are visceral and razor sharp. Newton, who spent 50 years provoking the viewer with his use of psycho-sexual triggers, never escaped an association with fetish. With only eight years behind the camera, Howard knows she has a way to go before her body of work can compare.
Author John Gilmore is more precise in his comparison of the two.
“People tend to raise their eyebrows when I say Justice has surpassed Newton,” says Gilmore. “What I mean by that is Helmut’s shots tend towards the voyeuristic experience while Justice manages to engage subliminally.”
Gilmore is a recognized true crime writer with an unflinching, snapshot-like style. The desperate characters that fill his books were collected during a lifetime of wandering that has always led him back to Los Angeles.
Constrained by labels like “erotic” and “edgy,” Howard detoured to Las Vegas for four years and saw her photos blown up to billboards along the Strip aas well as huge promotional light boxes in many of the casinos..
“I shot Blue Man Group, Siegfried and Roy, Waylon Jennings and all the Elvis impersonators,” she says.
Her list of references includes many upscale gigs: Saks 5th Avenue, Nordstrom, Playboy, Maxim, Esquire and French Vogue, to name a few. Howard’s work has also appeared in publications like Heavy Metal, Easyriders and Marquis.
Back in LA after leaving the neon desert behind, Howard continues to attract a list of celebrity subjects.
Using a digital Nikon D2x and a Hasselblad for film, she prefers shooting models with ”punch” and that dark exciting sexuality.
“I would not want to photograph Tom Cruise,” she says. “I wouldn’t walk across the street to do that.”
A favorite is pin-up goddess Mamie Van Doren, one of the “Three Ms” that included Mansfield and Marilyn in the 1950s.
“We did one called ‘Black Stocking Murder.’ She looked dead with a black stocking wrapped around her neck and she was in black nylons – it was pretty cool,” says Howard. “She’s 74 years old and all the photos of her were un-retouched.”
“The Black Stocking Murder” was part of a compilation of 80 photographs Howard exhibited on May 20, 2006, in a downtown LA gallery space for a one-night-only collaboration with author Gilmore. Called “Sharp Edges,” the show was a benefit for the Children of the Night charity and was attended by 600 guests.
Interspersed with text by Gilmore, prints were mounted to the walls with custom-made knives created by House of Steel. Between pin-ups of naughty girls in old-fashioned foundation garments there were scenes of disconcerting violence and surreal sexuality; porn stars and circus clowns, murder victims and mayhem.
Inspired by Gilmore’s passages from “Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder,” one photo set featured model Heidi Van Horne, hauntingly and tragically accurate as the Dahlia, set against a backdrop of the Biltmore Hotel; the last location where Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia) was seen alive in 1947. Other shots are re-created crime scene photos of the murder, with the model grotesquely cut in half and dumped in the same vacant lot where Short’s body was discovered. Howard notes that this was a project Newton had intended on shooting, but never got a chance to complete.
Also part of the show; large prints depicting fetish diva Brittany Andrews as a vinyl-clad, tiara-wearing hell cat, juxtaposed cleverly against photos of her as a wanton yet tender Cinderella, ball-gowned and ready for her glass slipper.
Interpreting Howard’s work as portrayals of women spotlighted in situations of ultra-glamorized sex and violence is an overly simplistic analysis. Her subjects, she says, are more often endowed with iconic qualities of strength and control.
“There are a number of photographers who shoot women that are always very subjugated, wearing ball-gags or strung up. I don’t do that,” she contends. “All my women are very, very powerful figures; beautiful, larger-than-life figures.”
Some of the subjects seem defiant, on the verge of rebellious acts. Others assume soft-focused aspects of illuminated femininity and grace.
Either way, Howard is unapologetic.
“A lot of people, it’s over their heads,” she says. “If they don’t have enough life experience on their plate to understand it, I’m not going to explain it to them.
“At the end of the day, I really don’t give a shit if anybody likes it at all.
I really shoot it for my eye. I’m thrilled to death if other people like it, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t shoot it to please anyone else.”
With an artistic sensibility she picked up somewhere along the road, Howard concludes, “You know, there’s a motorcycle T-shirt that says, ‘If I have to explain why I ride, then you’ll never understand.’ It’s sort of like that.”
-J. Cachapero