Movement

It’s the tail end of Aries season, the season of drive and action, of getting rid of stagnant energy. The season of spring and breaks and travel. For Issue 34, the Image team found inspiration in the expansive idea of movement.

The seed of this April theme came from Image’s former beauty editor at large Darian Symoné Harvin, when she mentioned wanting to interview a pole-dancing trio. For the occasion, we organized a photoshoot at Tea at Shiloh in the Arts District, where the three women — Cami Árboles, Mackenzie Palmer and Devon Cherry — moved like liquid and light, “their strengths coexisting,” as Harvin writes. To them, movement is as much about release as it is about pain and resilience, as they literally and spiritually hold one another up.

Movement, the trio has learned, can cause pain, but it also can help one grow from it. “Feel the sensations!” my fitness instructor likes to say while I sweat and wobble in plank. “Stay with the discomfort!” He’s trying to change us not just physically but psychically. Movement alters us from within.

This issue is filled with dazzling images of people and things in motion: skaters in rinks, models on runways, luxury suitcases on planes. Movement is pleasurable, fun and transporting. It’s also a form of community-building, as is illustrated in Kailyn Brown’s incredible oral history of Black skate culture in L.A. And it’s a means of finding self-expression, as Stephen Galloway tells Cat Woods in a feature on movement directors — the people orchestrating how models and actors carry their bodies on runways and stages.

In another essay, staff writer Julissa James touches upon the danger of when we move too quickly, when movement becomes a means to an end. Julissa recently felt the urge to “spring clean” — to move things out of sight, as if clearing her entire closet could reset her life in the process. Alas, she writes: “You can never really run away. I tried, and all I kept doing was running into myself. Over and over and over.” One of many things that Julissa’s beautiful essay reveals is that we can only move forward once we integrate our past — once we’ve stayed with the discomfort, grown from the pain.

Elisa Wouk Almino
Editor in Chief

Image logo by Emma Bers For The Times