Member-only story
Only Human: How Sisters Sarah J. & Sally A. Edwards Disarm Performers To Create Intimate Art Portraits
“Our approach is ‘BLAG’. It’s not just the name of a magazine, it’s our whole ethos; something that naturally came about when we first started,” says Sarah J. Edwards, one half of the dynamic force behind the images that gave BLAG its cult following. This is a rarity. Not just the ability of two young women to build a magazine from scratch, that rivals leaders in the publishing industry, but the ability to offer a point of view unseen elsewhere. Because, as we all know, there’s a transaction that takes place when a glossy features a celebrity: the celebrity gets to promote whatever series, album, tour, tequila, book or bodywear range they’re putting their name to, and the magazine gets to sell copies by making the celebrity the subject of highly elaborate imagery. Then along came Sarah and Sally, bucking the system and stripping it all back.
Obviously, the practice of the big glossy spread had to change anyway, now that people consume a large slice of their pop culture online, and publications need to keep pace with how to exclus-ify — and therefore, monetise — the digital dissemination of information. But what hasn’t been updated, is the propensity for publications to feature celebs in the same old ways: a sycophantic tribute that focuses on the virtue of a subject that…
