Table of contents for Issue 60 in Huck

‘DESERT SUPER POWER’ , A 26-YEAR-OLD ELECTRICIAN, DESIGNS CLOTHES FOR MANY IN BOTSWANA’S METAL SCENE. PHOTO BY PEP BONET / NOOR. In the 1967 novel The Outsiders, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a world split in two. You’re either a “greaser” who lives on the wrong side of town, or you’re a privileged “soc”. Socs (or socials) “have all the breaks” and “an attitude longer than a limousine”. Greasers are “hoods and JDs”: juvenile delinquents who grow up on the streets with a survival instinct to match. In this teen landscape, your destiny is set. You’re either accepted or rejected, bound for glory or a social outcast. Tulsa, like the real world, seems cast in black and white... until a teen author adds some much-needed colour, helping her characters to see things…

Maria Toorpakai Wazir has never had the odds in her favour. Where she grew up – in the Talibancontrolled tribal region of Waziristan, in Pakistan – women are forbidden from walking without a man, attending school, watching TV, listening to music or even reading. Just playing sports can get you killed. Yet despite those restrictions, she has become a top-ranked professional squash player through an unlikely path: disguising herself as a guy. Now 26, Maria says she understood from a young age that boys and girls did very different things. “I saw girls staying at home or standing in their doorways, holding their younger siblings... It was just so boring!” She’s sitting in a corner of London’s Barbican Centre before the UK premiere of Girl Unbound, a documentary about her…

ON A NARROW stretch of land between northeast Moldova and Ukraine lies a country that, according to the United Nations, doesn’t officially exist. Transnistria may have its own passport and currency, but they’re not valid anywhere else. The region declared its independence from Moldova in 1990, the same year that photographers Anton Polyakov and Anya Galatonova were born there. With a population of less than half a million, the country is still too young to have its own distinct culture. But as first-generation Transnistrians, Anton and Anya wanted to document the sliver of identity that does belong to them – one that, much like the place itself, often goes unacknowledged. “The biggest misconception is that Transnistria is some black hole or a museum of Soviet symbols,” says Anton. “Journalists and…

Mark Borchardt is an independent filmmaker operating outside of convention. But if you’re at all familiar with his name, you might have the wrong idea about him. The 50-year-old is best known as the subject of Chris Smith’s 1999 documentary, American Movie. On the surface, he appears unchanged: tall frame, long hair and a Wisconsin accent that mirrors the one from nearby North Dakota (as heard in Fargo). But in reality, he’s a remarkably different figure. American Movie portrayed Mark as a young auteur struggling to make his debut film, Coven. It makes for an occasionally calamitous tale of a man from a small town with big dreams. In one memorable scene, Mark stands in front of a torn-down building he’d planned to use as a filming location, voicing his…

English punk band Angelic Upstarts unleash their fury at a Miner’s Benefit Dance at the Barbary Coast Club in Sunderland, Wearside, 1985. Their anti-fascist, socialist stance was the perfect centrepoint for Manx photographer Chris Killip, who spent more than a decade documenting the fallout of deindustrialisation in the North East – an outsider capturing outsiders in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante runs at J. Paul Getty Museum, LA, until 13 August.…

Sorry, we’re bumpkins,” says Daisy May Cooper. “Complete and utter country bumpkins,” adds her brother, Charlie, shaking his head. The pair are sitting in a café beside BBC Broadcasting House, explaining how all this – doing interviews, having a hit comedy series, just being in London – makes them fish out of water. Not long ago, the pair had zero prospects: sharing the same bedroom in their parents’ Cotswolds home and cleaning the same office block together, feeling like life had left them behind. Now they star in This Country, a mockumentary series they’ve created about marginalised youth in rural Britain. They’ve managed to satirise small-town life so well that people from all backgrounds quote their favourite lines at them in the street. So yes, they’re outliers… but they’ve fought…

Mac, co–founder and unofficial godfather of Bikestormz, bends 20p pieces with a pair of pl iers before giving them out to some of the event's younger disciples at the Cycle Pitstop, Hackney. He tells the kids to always carry their 'Zairoux Coin' (a word he made up to mean 'strength, unity and love') as it’ll bring them luck whenever on two wheels. "There’s no hierarchy in this thing," says photographer Theo McInnes. "By handing these coins out to the younger ones, Mac was basically saying, 'You are as much a part of this as anyone else'. And that’s the powerful thing about the wider Bikelife movement: it doesn’t discriminate in any way. All you need is a bike, and then you’ re family." Right after this image was taken, the…

Dinner party revellers smile for the camera at Casa Susanna, a resort for cross-dressers in the Catskills, New York. This image is among 340 found photographs that were taken by men (and sometimes by their wives) who saw the resort as a sanctuary – a safe space in which they could explore their identity at a time when society saw them as sexual deviants. Their story is captured in Outsiders, a book that celebrates the images – by Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Gordon Parks, Danny Lyon and Nan Goldin – that forced America to bear witness to life on the fringe. Outsiders: American Photography and Film 1950s-1980s is published by Rizzoli.…

One summer day, 10-year-old Nadav Weiman made his way back to the car, tired from an afternoon spent with a friend and his mother at the mall. Rain doesn’t often fall in Tel Aviv, so when the sound of thunder echoed through the streets, something didn’t feel quite right. “Suddenly there were police cars and ambulances and fire trucks,” Nadav recalls now, some 21 years later. “We saw the smoke and realised it was a suicide bombing in the centre where we’d just left.” Like most Israeli children, Nadav grew up with an understanding that his fellow citizens were in constant danger. From kindergarten to high school, he was taught a one-sided history of the Jewish state: the one where Israel was founded on empty deserts, where the barbarism of…

Chris Urquhart is trying to sleep on the floor of a creaking attic with a six-foot alligator beside her. The shape of old halloween decorations can be made out in the dark while, from below, voices drift up from elsewhere in the squat. One bemoans the used condoms all over her bedroom floor, another rasps about the kid he beat up for raping a friend. With just a space blanket for comfort, Chris tries to ignore the reek of well-travelled bodies and keeps telling herself that she’s safe, that she can do this. “I’m lying there, crying to myself, not believing a word of that,” she says now, nearly seven years later. “Meanwhile Kitra [Cahana, her friend and travelling partner] is just chillin’ next to me, flipping through her photos,…

Thirty-year-old Mohammad Abu Hajar has lived in five different countries – and not always by choice. The first move came in 1990, at the age of three, when war forced his Syrian family to leave Kuwait and resettle in their homeland. He grew up in the northern city of Tartous, going to school and taking piano lessons under Assad’s police state: a political climate where one cannot criticise the regime, only contend with the status quo. Over time, Mohammad found an outlet for his frustrations through hip hop – something he didn’t even like initially. “I thought it was just shitty American music only concerned with promoting drug use,” he says now. Once the internet arrived in Syria, around 2001, Mohammad heard hip hop activist Immortal Technique rhyme about Palestine…

It’s possible to still have an adventure, even if you’re studiobound,” says Ollie Stafford, Huck’s art director. “You just have to use your imagination.” Ollie has surfed all manner of craft since he was a teenager and spends as much time as possible at the coast. With constant rolling deadlines in London, however, it’s vital for him to get out and get paddling as much as possible. “This is where the inflatable stand-up paddle board comes in,” he says. “It’s so nice to be able to take a stroll down to the canal with the board in the backpack and just get out on the water for an hour after work. I’m even thinking of commuting!” London’s network of cuts, canals, basins and other waterways, each of which wind slowly…