Cailin on the Grass

Selling print magazines in 2014 requires either stubbornness or genius, and Monster Children seems to operate on both. Their latest issue was guest-curated by Mike D of the Beastie Boys, and it puts Cailin Russo as its cover face—photographed by Kassia Meador in a fat green summer meadow. That combination of names and setting is almost unfairly good.

Russo is twenty and already has that physical intelligence you get from someone trained as a dancer and gymnast: a body that knows itself, an ease of movement that registers in still images as a kind of presence. Meador shoots her with warmth and proximity, more like someone with a camera and a friend than a photographer and a subject, and the companion video has that quality of real summer afternoon light—loose and a little sleepy—that I’ve been trying to achieve in my own work for years without quite landing it.

I keep coming back to a few of the stills. There’s something about a beautiful woman in tall grass with nothing to prove that makes the rest of the world feel very noisy by comparison.