Table of contents for Issue 66 - Summer Issue in Huck

SINGLES I Siân Davey PROM, DEVON, SUMMER 2015 Photographer Siân Davey spent over three years enjoying unbridled access to a world that most teenagers try to keep secret: late-night parties and hungover mornings, topless swimming and tears over the telephone. The access came via her stepdaughter Martha, who allowed Siân to document what it means to be a teen in rural Devon, along the UK’s south coast, between the ages of 16 and 19. Now that she’s turned 20, the collection – simply titled Martha – has been published by Trolley Books. “There’s something unique about Martha: unlike the rest of my kids, she is completely open and unselfconscious,” says Siân, who’s 53. “There’s something quite liberating about her personality and it’s extraordinary to work with. A camera has been…

Scotty Stopnik is standing on a French motocross track, scanning the horizon through a thicket of photographers, looking like a dirtbag straight out of 1964. The 32-year-old’s muddy white jeans are tucked into a pair of old biker boots, his filthy open-face helmet – the kind of thing racers stopped using long ago – offering all the protective qualities of a glazed ostrich egg. But Scotty doesn’t seem to be perturbed by the lack of EU approval. The helmet merely ticks a box, an absolute minimal nod to regulations. He’s in the Basque Country with his dad, Scott, and one of his younger brothers, Taylor. The trio are travelling on a sunglasses company’s ticket, pinballing between San Sebastian, Biarritz and other coordinates to represent the Cycle Zombies crew. They are…

Desiree Akhavan needs a time-out. She’s standing in the middle of a brightly coloured members’ bar at Sundance London, where her new film The Miseducation of Cameron Post is getting its UK premiere, feeling a bit frazzled. The place is swarming with people – movie geeks shuffling through lengthy queues, publicists frantically scanning clipboards – and the filmmaker has a lot to juggle: not just Q&A screenings and photoshoots, but the more personal hassles of worrying about ticket allocation and herding loved ones about. This atmosphere is not made for an intimate conversation with a stranger. Yet after taking a brief moment to herself on the sidelines, the 34-year-old takes a seat and locks into the moment: funny, smart and charmingly candid. Desiree, it turns out, is one of those…

Stuart Swezey is thinking about how to outdo the cops. It’s 1983 and he’s driving through the scorching heat of Mexico on a road trip with friends. The stereo is blasting English post-punk groups like Wire and Magazine, as well as bands like Savage Republic from back home in LA. He stares out at the vast desert thinking about all the DIY punk gigs where police have either shut down the show or attacked the audience. Then an idea hits him: ‘Let’s move the shows out to the desert.’ That sparked a series of gigs thrown together by a 20-year-old who knew nothing about organising events. Stuart wrote for fanzines and had been immersed in the punk rock scene since he was 16, but his day job saw him working…

Gabriel Alfonzo Sanchez stands quietly at a stove in the Colombian beach hostel where he works, pushing his lunch of chopped vegetables and rice around a frying pan, the dog-tag around his neck jingling as he stirs. To the bikini-wearing backpackers busy squashing avocados in the background, nothing about him would seem out of the ordinary: he’s just another 26-year-old in surfer shorts and flip-flops, carrying his slender frame and wide shoulders casually, flashing a playful smile now and then. But Gabriel is Venezuelan. And like most of his friends and peers right now, he’s a long way from home and living a life that is anything but a holiday. Last year, he gathered up what he could and fled Venezuela’s devastating economic and political crisis, joining an estimated four…

Photographer Mark Leaver captures a moment backstage at an Indian bodybuilding contest in Chennai, a city on the south-east coast. “Being an English photographer in India has its pros and cons,” he says. “The advantage is that people are so interested in you, which opens up access to a lot of situations. Without putting ideas into people’s heads, you can just walk into homes – or even entire subcultures – with a wave of your camera and a smile. The disadvantage is that it becomes hard to go unnoticed, making candid photography a lot more challenging. “This is one moment I remember clearly. I approached a circle of men applying fake tan to a guy about to compete for Mr South India. They were all so transfixed on the competitor,…

Aniela Gottwald calls it “trail brain”. Speaking from her base in Ojai, California, the 26-year-old apologises for struggling to articulate her feelings, having only just returned from a three-month expedition along the Arizona trail. It was a journey marked by setbacks: injuries, the end of a relationship and her family home burning down in a wildfire. She only had her two wild mustangs for company, leaving almost too much room to think. “I’ve spent so much time not talking,” she jokes, an excited giggle breaking an otherwise calming voice. “The longer you spend in nature, the more you pick up on little things that you wouldn’t notice otherwise, like bird calls and the sounds of trees. This whole other world opens up.” The trail, stretching 800 miles between Mexico and…

A thick plume of pink smoke rises into the air over East London. Just visible beneath it is a man with his face covered by a red shirt, holding a flare aloft. All around him hundreds of fans decked in red-and-white are jumping up and down, thrusting banners and cans of Polish lager about as they chant, ‘No pyro, no party.’ The rowdy mob looks like it’s going to burst through the perimeter fence and onto the pitch any second. It may make for an intimidating sight, but join the Clapton Ultras in The Scaffold and you’ll be welcomed warmly no matter who you are. The Old Spotted Dog ground in Newham is an unlikely place to start a revolution. With a capacity of just 2,000, this crumbling stadium is…

You hear Queen B before you see her. The throaty sound of a high-performance exhaust echoes around the industrial buildings in a little corner of South West London, gradually growing louder until, finally, a bright-red vintage BMW pulls into the yard. Riding on beasty chrome rims, it hangs so low that the engine almost scrapes the floor. Wearing white high-tops and a camo Yankies baseball cap, out steps Becky Evans, aka Queen B. At a time when male-dominated motorsport is struggling to stay relevant, the 26-year-old is inspiring a new generation of women to take an interest in car culture. She first discovered it for herself through ’90s hip hop videos and today uses her YouTube channel as a way to bring cars, street style and creativity together. As Becky…

Domenic Palermo has been through some shit. After playing a gig in Oakland, California, three years ago, a gang of heavy-set guys beat him up so badly that it put him in hospital. There were multiple fractures, requiring 19 staples to the frontman’s head and a reattachment of his ear, leading to degenerative brain damage. Pulling himself together in time to record Nothing’s second album, just two weeks later, the frontman – known to friends as ‘Nicky’ – then found himself vomiting between takes, all while grieving from the sudden death of his father. Then, just before the album’s release, it emerged that Nothing’s label was secretly funded by Martin Shkreli, the ‘Pharma Bro’ who gained infamy for inflating the price of Aids-related medication by over 5,000 per cent. “It…

A group of twenty-something guys are crammed into a small room, flexing their muscles and applying thick layers of fake tan on dark brown skin. It’s approaching 40°C outside but, inside this windowless pen, it’s hard to breathe. Sweat is running freely and the air is thick with a tang of muscle spray as guys attempt to accentuate their bulges before stepping out on stage. Bodybuilding is booming across India. Mr Universe-inspired competitions and gyms are popping up everywhere, from small towns in the middle of nowhere to megacities like Delhi and Mumbai. In just over a decade, economic prosperity has transformed a struggling nation into a country developing at rapid speed, with smartphones becoming ubiquitous and tech hubs competing with the growth of Silicon Valley. The country has long…

It’s the morning after Donald Trump’s election on a street in West Hollywood, where a woman with tears in her eyes grasps onto a man and shares an emotional embrace. But only some aspects of this image, captured by artist and photographer Max Pinckers, are in fact real. It is indeed the morning of a new dawn in American politics, and the emotions captured are more or less reflective of half of the country, but the couple are strangers – actors, to be more specific, posing under direction from Pinckers. The image may be someone’s version of the truth, but it’s certainly not truth as we know it. “When it comes to photographs and images, I think they communicate a lot more than simply representing what is shown,” Pinckers says.…

As a wide-eyed college student, the political landscape looked pretty bleak to Jen Gurecki. George W. Bush had been elected president and the US was going to war with Iraq. Feeling helpless, she started her own protest movement – through underwear. “We were so distraught about it all that I thought it would be hilarious to screenprint ‘The only bush I trust is my own’ onto knickers,” she says, laughing at her younger, idealistic self. “Oh, to be 23 again… If only we could have [Bush] back now.” Today, amid a landscape that’s even more divisive, Jen’s drive for progression remains strong. She’s speaking from Cape Town, where she just completed a 6,200km-long charity cycle from Kenya, a place where she has a long history of supporting rural women. “I…