Above: Tim Groen, Gerald DeCock. New York, 2010.

“I owe a lot to fashion, for sure,” says Gerald DeCock, who just returned from Florida where he worked on a commercial campaign with Bruce Weber, with whose 1988 Chet Baker doc, Let’s Get Lost, he started his career.
Burned out on agents and mind-numbing mainstream work years ago, Gerald, who started out as a hair stylist, has let his career flow to a place that feels more natural to him. “These days, my work boils down to ‘anything visual’ really,” he explains. “But because I’ve always been picky and selective about the work I take on, it’s not like I’m burned out on hair, either”.

Thanks to his pickiness, even the commercial projects he agrees to do are interesting from a cultural point of view. The already legendary Bruce Weber–directed video Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing for YSL Homme (A/W 10/11) is a good example. As is the “West Side Story” commercial for GAP, directed by Mike Mills.
And then there was artist Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers, the Museum of Modern Art/Creative Time-commissioned video, which premiered as a monumentally scaled projection on and around the MoMA, on which Gerald worked in a Hair Stylist capacity. Recently he notched up the fluidity of his job description even more. For starters, Gerald can now call himself a Producer and Art Director as well, having worked as such on All That Glitters, a 2010 “micro-budget” thriller, directed by Matthew Collins.

But perhaps exciting to him above anything else, are the non-commissioned visual projects he’s been working on.
Gerald, who is a long-term resident of the Chelsea Hotel — where he lives in a rooftop apartment with ample outdoor space — has always had a fondness for shoots that take place between the hours of sunset and twilight. This inspired him to collaborate with photographer/director Sam Bassett, who was, until recently, his neighbor on the Chelsea Hotel roof.
“I did most of the art direction, casting, props, whatever,” says Gerald, “And Sam would shoot our set-ups, in natural lighting, or even in lack of it.”
For a full year, the two neighbors would put friends and members of Gerald’s (beautiful) clientele to work as models for shoots that Gerald would style á l’improviste, using pieces of fabric, fiber-optics, various trinkets, “whatever was around,” and, as one would imagine, a fair amount of hair styling.
The concept of the psychedelically flavored project, which they called The Magic Hour, was to work in a way that’s kind of rough and spontaneous, and to do something that forms a counterpoint to the preciousness of most fashion productions.
The extraordinary location of the two friends’ apartments — catching superb views, and all of the colors and shadows of those dramatic Manhattan sunsets — plays a big role in the final images. “It always seemed to work out magically.”
The final images combine a trippy and dreamy pre-Rafaelite/Faerie spirit with a dose of Biba/Cockette-glam. And while the photos are in a certain way fashion images, they are, at the same time, never about fashion, so that if one were to look at them without knowing anything about the project, it would be hard to pin down when they were made.
Pleased as he was with the collaboration, Gerald created a photo-blog, called Gracious Vigilantes, to keep everybody who was involved in the loop.
The latest development is that a curator in Tucson, AZ, is interested in the possibility of Gerald producing a Magic Hour type series of shoots at the Congress Hotel in that town.

And while the details of a continuation of The Magic Hour (with a different cast, in a new location) are being hammered out, Gerald already started working on his next collaborative series: Essay in Textures.
This time around both Gerald and the series’ subject, his friend Dominic Vine, are responsible for the photography, which is done with an infra-red camera.
“Dominic looks just like Jezus, with a long beard and really beautiful long hair,” says Gerald, “He really inspires me”. The portraits Gerald showed me look even more timeless then the previous work (think Victorian Daguerro-types of Rasputin). Without using any product —Gerald is known professionally for his no-product stance, and is in demand for his “no-product looks” — he creates abstract textures in Dominic’s hair, meant to resemble “things you find in nature”, rather than hair styles.

“I really appreciate the fashion world, and it is a huge part of who I am. It’s a really good creative outlet,” Gerald reflects, when we talk about how his work is more and more about and with friends. “But as time goes by I’m learning who I am as an artist. And I’m realizing that you don’t need to work with tons of different people.”

Links:
>Gerald DeCock
>Gracious Vigilantes
>Check out some of my favorite images from The Magic Hour here
>Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers
> Bruce Weber’s Ain’t nothing like the real thing for YSL Homme