Eliot D'Silva, Vice: "Still taking the risk"

Don’t forget the nineties," I heard Stephen Malkmus, lead guitarist of reformed indie rock heroes Pavement, say to the Brixton Academy this May before launching into a slew of wounded and sarcastic old songs. Slung between a heartfelt plea and a bratty aside, his words tap into the kind of nostalgia that Vice magazine cultivates with such glee, going beyond the average remember-that-cartoon quality that infantilises a reader into submission.

The mainstream media has long since discovered that there are topics – school days, nudity, and downright embarrassment – that it doesn’t really have to cover, like an adolescent who suddenly realises he no longer has to choke down his veggies. But over recent years, as its output has begun to encompass video, music and fiction, Vice has continued to supply its readers with their deliciously teenage roughage.

Yet it’s always important to provide youth culture with an element of traction in the real world and, particularly in its use and promotion of photography, Vice meets this challenge head on. Perhaps the biggest complaint about the magazine’s fan-base (captured neatly in YouTube sensation ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’) is how their hip lives are so apparently performances. But by putting these unknown kids before the lenses of professional snappers Ryan McGinley and Tim Barber, some shocking and vital new art has been fostered. McGinley’s images freeze road-tripping nudes in hazy frames that, like the majority of Vice’s loosely edited pages, wear their imperfections more like biographical data than signs of sloppiness.

We’ve all heard Bob Dylan’s famous lines: "If my thought dreams could be seen / They’d probably put my head in a guillotine." Dylan might understand the spirit of a publication like Vice, a great example of having those dreams but still taking the risk.

Zeljka Marosevic, Vice: "Nothing more than a pose"

Cool is a slippery term, usually defined most precisely by what it isn’t rather than what it is. Luckily, Vice magazine has developed a system of signs so clear that anyone looking to crack the cool code would only have to flick through its pages to be educated once and for all. Black and white or grainy Polaroid-esque photographs, articles on casual Class A drug use and mildly lesbian fashion shoots all flash before your eyes in one pure moment of understanding: so this is what you’ve been missing out on.

In credit to Andy Capper, he’s not the one making these assertions. I admire his statement, "When I think of ‘cool’, I think of a cat wearing shades." He explodes the term that limits our response to a magazine which contributes to a recording of youth culture. Yet in the process of recording, Vice seeks to create a lifestyle prototype. I’m reminded of a house party I attended after the first episode of Skins aired. As things, as they do, got hairy and lairy, a stranger walked past me, nodded at one site of carnage and muttered approvingly, "Skins". My new friend believed that as a drunken collective we had reached the apex of what teen life could be, and it had been brought to us direct from Channel 4.

I groaned for many reasons but mostly because teenage life in all its excess and disappointments remains almost ethereal, making attempts to record it ineffective. When you try to write about it or put a lens in front of it, what you’re photographing or describing moves from spontaneous, elusive action to nothing more than a pose. Even if you like wearing American Apparel and taking Polaroid photos, seeing someone doing this in a magazine makes it appear contrived and ridiculous. Vice reduces youth culture into such homogeny and then hands it back as a model of how to live, a pale and limp parody of what adolescent experience really is.