Bombshell is photographer Ethan James Green’s captivating new monograph, published by Baron Books, which features a cast of New York faces including Connie Fleming, Dara Allen, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, Marcs Goldberg, Hari Nef, Martine Gutierriez, and Devan Diaz, a writer who provides the excellent introductory essay. They have all worked and collaborated with Green over the years, but perhaps more importantly, they are friends with him, and oftentimes with each other. Just to emphasize the collaborative aspect of it all, the friends’ circle extended to those who did the hair: Jimmy Paul, Lucas Wilson, and Sonny Molina. There’s a lot of hair in this book—major, major hair.
There’s also a distinct sense of intimacy, which sometimes explicitly and other times obliquely poses the question: What is a bombshell? Green’s images reveal that the answers are entirely subjective, which makes total sense: He is, after all, a photographer who is always subjectifying, never objectifying, the people he photographs.
In the process of channeling the bombshell, his models adopt (or adapt) wigs, lingerie, flora, and expanses of their own skin—the skin they’re in—to present their own archetype of the bombshell in ways which feel baring, in both senses of the word. (Some also have a playful sense of humor and a deliberate, endearing awkwardness, setting up the whole idea of bombshell-ing only to then disrupt it.) Four of those women featured in the book—Fleming, Goldberg, Diaz, and Allen—delve deeper into their definition of the term here.
Connie Fleming
When Ethan photographs you, it’s very empathetic and instinctive. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Portfolio—it was a movie shot in the 1980s, and there’s a scene where Steven Meisel is shooting all the top models, and it’s about a language between a photographer and subject, where the photographer moves and the model mirrors him. It’s that same thing with Ethan: Because I was a model, there’s a shorthand conversation between artist and subject. It’s not taking you, the model, the subject, out of the equation—it is inclusive.
[For Bombshell,] Ethan gave me the choice of my interpretation, my inspiration—what I wanted to portray. I brought pinup images, because that was my interpretation of bombshell—the golden age of Hollywood, 1940s wartime pinup girls from Ava Gardner to Betty Grable—and my input was Dorothy Dandridge and Bettie Page, that sort of [mid-century erotic photographer] Irving Klaw Teaserama. It’s a little subversive. It is my Blackness, my love of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!—that Russ Meyer [portrayal of] powerful women—the idea that femininity is not weakness. It isn’t coming from the 1970s Annie Hall interpretation of feminism; you know, taking on the masculine to empower oneself.
[The era of Grable, Page, et al] was a man’s, man’s, man’s world, so [these images] are a gaze back to that time when misogyny ruled—the white male patriarchal stranglehold. All of these women broke out of that vice, and their power came from that. If you look at Marilyn Monroe, or Jayne Mansfield, or Dorothy Dandridge, you look at them through the exploitative male gaze, but they all shattered that. And in a post-Me Too, a post-COVID and BLM world, there’s a need for inclusivity, a need for thoughtfulness. Your image is your own—it isn’t cast upon you.
[The day we shot] we were talking about that energy, and I happened to mention Tony Viramontes and Antonio Lopez—because I’m an illustrator—with [hair stylist] Jimmy Paul, and he said, “Oh, like Janet Jackson.” [Viramontes worked on Jackson’s cover art for Control.] So we started with Viramontes. It was very fluid; we wanted to try what we all loved. It was a great sharing of artists’ work and what influenced us as artists, and the shoot went wherever the spirit of creativity took us. I had gone to Victoria’s Secret for some great lingerie; I’d been thinking about Bettie Page, and about Jackie 60, the great nightclub where I worked, and of [costume designer] Kitty Boots, who did House of Domination. I was always Black Bettie—that was my character.
The shoot was very empowering. I was maybe two, three years out of my journey with breast cancer—there’s a scar on my right breast, and I wanted to reclaim my personal sexiness, my mojo, by not letting that hamper me—to allow me to embrace my new me. I refused to let it shame me in any way. And that’s my love of these photographs: They’re of me standing with them and not letting cancer tear me down. Physically and mentally, it disassembles you, and you’re just left with the pieces of yourself, so you have to rebuild and embrace.
Marcs Goldberg
It was hairstylist Lucas Wilson’s suggestion that Ethan and I shoot a hair test together, so [it was all] very casual and spontaneous. At the same time, within our friend group, we started to use the term bombshell—though we now don’t really use it anymore [laughs].
I put a little of this in an Instagram post [when the book came out], but my first interaction with “bombshell” came from… I don’t want to say a dark place, but it came from a directive that I received from a boyfriend in New York who gave me instructions on how to present and represent femininity in a particular way that spoke to his taste, which I actually think is pretty important to the term in general, because it is a sort of directive—it is a sort of term which is more familiar to a masc describing a femme. I was very young at the time, 18 or 19, and I became really wrapped up in a desire to adhere to the idea of “bombshell.”
It just so happens that Victoria’s Secret sells a Bombshell bra, which has like 80% padding, and it’s something that trans girls as well as obviously cis women who want to achieve a larger, more “bombshell” bust wear. [Now] it’s actually a Victoria’s Secret term—more modern, less Jean Harlow—so I was trying to fill that role. The relationship obviously deteriorated, and with it went my bombshell femininity, which I think is for the best.
But then, years later, I started using it again casually to describe things as I started to swing more in a feminine presentation. Not really changing intellectually or emotionally; you don’t necessarily change your personal approach to things, but you change your physical approach to things which, for better or for worse, changes the world’s approach to you in many ways.
Anyway, we were casually using this term bombshell, and we did the hair test—me, Ethan, and Lucas. At the same time, I was looking at a couple of blogs, one being La Petite Melancolie. It had a lot of turn-of-the-century photography of women in pastoral settings, or in studios, mimicking a Salome kind of thing—a lot of nudity, a lot of body—and I was really attracted to those images, which were in my mind when we shot. It was springtime, and I went to the flower market, and to a retailer I love called US Evergreens—they don’t sell tedious things like tulips [laughs] but branches, leaves, vines….
I arrived [to the shoot] without any clothes, but with leaves and things, maybe much to Ethan and Lucas’s shock. Because of that, it forced us to shoot more nudes than, I think, anyone really anticipated. Lucas had brought all these crazy wigs, like crazy Dolly Parton stuff—wigs for drag queens, basically. And that forced a certain silhouette with the face and with the hair that was accentuated by the posing.
It’s my understanding that after that day was done, Ethan felt inspired to continue. He has a huge cork board running along one of the walls of his studio where he puts all the images he has made—a mood board of his own work—and it was really there that he started building Bombshell very soon after we shot. I look at this book as almost a work of satire, honestly—I can’t really be specific as to why, but there sometimes just seems to be a farcical sense to the photos. It’s not making fun of the subjects, but it’s making fun of the scenarios in some way—there’s something humorous and light-hearted and satirical at play.
Unlike his first monograph, Young New York, which feels so tactile and textural—you almost speak to the subjects and hear about their experiences—there’s something about this that’s more performative in some way. The images don’t feel as reachable—maybe because of the satirical approach. Also—and this isn’t a critique of Ethan at all—but I think through the project, he started to understand the bombshell, and the presentation of femininity, in a more complex way. We lovingly describe the photographic treatment in Young New York as the “EJGkammer,” which is both the light and the approach with these photos: nothing can be hidden; everything is apparent.
Devan Diaz
Some of the people in the book—myself included—were, during the time of photographing Bombshell, very invested in this sort of high-femme persona in a very classical, almost archetypal way. I was blonde for nine months of my life, and Ethan captured that. I had just ended my relationship, moved out of my apartment, got a new job. I was in this moment where I used blonde hair as a spotlight on myself to change my life, and Marcs and Dara cut off their hair, and Martine [Gutierrez, an artist, who was also shot for Bombshell] did the same.
The incubation period [for the book] was during COVID. We were all in the city, and we all have private Instagram accounts, and we were constantly posting images and looking at each other’s images. That’s how we all communicate, especially now that Dara’s always away and so is Martine, and Ethan’s quite busy as well—we keep track of each other through images and process our lives through posting pictures online for each other to decode.
Recently, I was thinking that the two fields that a transsexual could be very successful at, at the top of the industry, are modeling and pornography. And not to say that modeling is pornography or anything like that, but I think that transsexuals are always authoring their image—or are an image—and to see yourself in a picture can be a lot of things. It can be a confirmation of things that you hope to be true about your body, and about the changes that you’ve perhaps made to your body.
Historically, transsexuals have been so heavily documented, but when I look at pictures—an early Nan Goldin, or even of Teri Toye, who was a Meisel muse back in the day—I consider the models just as much an author of the image. And I think in Bombshell, with Ethan, it was an opportunity to ask, “What do I want to show of myself?” I thought a lot about the showgirl and what the showgirl does, which is to give energy to the public, and the performance of that, I think, we all took very seriously.
I grew up in the South, and the people who could protect me the most from homophobia and transphobia were always white women—but they were also this kind of beauty that I would never be, this white ideal. I watched Marilyn Monroe films with my grandmother, and I saw what Marilyn means to America: a bombshell means a blonde ideal, a blonde white woman. And, frankly, I wanted to be one so badly—there’s Venus Xtravaganza in Paris Is Burning saying, “I want to be a spoiled rich white girl.” So my idea of a bombshell was Marilyn, Jean Harlow, Britney Spears—all of these blondes who are sort of meant to save the world, and their whole mythology becomes about their failure to save themselves—and to save America from whatever it is.
It’s interesting that the second I became blonde, I stopped being in a relationship with someone I didn’t want to be in a relationship with, and I started taking my writing more seriously, and I fell in love with the person that I felt deserving of—all of these things I just let myself have. That’s what Ethan captured. After those photos, when I’d had my hair and make-up done, I went and slept over at my now-boyfriend’s apartment, and I just felt so amazing. I thought of him in all of those pictures [as they were being taken] and being looked at by him. I was so happy to have these pictures as the official blonde pictures [of that time in my life].
Ethan’s images cracked open what a bombshell could be, which I think is just someone who embraces who they are without irony. That, to me, is what sexiness is: when someone embraces who they are. It’s not about empowerment, because empowerment feels external. A lot of image-making around transsexuals has been, for the past few years, since it became very popular, empowering—like, Check out this empowering photo shoot of trans youth, blah, blah, blah. Maybe some bombshells in the book are empowered, but it’s more like we’re watching these women, these people, embrace themselves—and I think the viewer is very lucky to see it.
Dara Allen
Bombshell. Oh, my goodness. Wow. A big word. I guess my vision of bombshells is tied up with Hollywood and the golden age of sex sirens and that vision of femininity and beauty. It is one of the archetypes of our world and our culture, and I really love working with archetypes and fashion, both in my work and in creating my own identity—to use these things that are cultural touchstones, built on collective memories that people have, and then using that familiarity to then maybe say something different about it, or subvert it.
There’s so much indulgence and glamour in the idea of a bombshell—it’s something I always idealized, always wanted to be, but never could attain. A bombshell is not clumsy, and I feel like I am quite clumsy [laughs]. I always imagine I could pull it off if I just had the right clothes. There’s a performance to it—no one really looks like that; everything about it is put on. It’s not for everyone, but it’s available to anyone who wants to be that type of girl.
Lucas did my hair [for this image]—this amazing, big hair. I kept getting stacked with multiple wigs. I’d never seen myself with that much hair! And it was crazy, when I walked out onto the street to shoot that photo, to experience the world around me change. Before we took the picture, I felt sort of grotesque—I was like, This is scary, and I don’t even know if people outside will hate it or love it—who knows? And then I went outside, and there was this really overwhelming positive response from all kinds of people—men, women. It was really wild to see that with a little hair and makeup, you could really turn into a star.
Ethan’s sensitivity is so apparent when he photographs or makes art: he’s doing it with us. Even though we are in this vulnerable position of being in front of the camera, dressed up to be out of this world, sometimes looking a certain way that might make us feel nervous or afraid, he’s on the front lines of it all with us. If something was ever to hit us, he would take the hit with us, and there’s something really powerful about that relationship.
For the past few years it’s been very scary for people to embrace sexiness as an image-making tool because of the way the world’s been, but it’s such an essential part of our emotional and psychological lives to express that part of ourselves. And I know that he feels that about his life the same way that we do: that if we explore it by almost exploding into this bombastic character, that’s a safe way for us all to investigate and discover why we feel that way.
A lot of us were in Ethan’s first book, Young New York, which was about exploring the world and looking for friendship and community in this New York landscape, as new people coming to the city. And then you grow up a little and you want to explore love or romance, or embody yourself in a different way, rebelling against how you’ve been seen before. What happens when you’re emboldened and want to indulge yourself in sexuality and beauty and joy? What does that look like as you mature into yourself as a person? I think that’s what this book explores: What it means to grow up in New York.
Bombshell, by Ethan James Green, is out now from Baron Books.