2014 Calendars: Milk and Faith

Nov 08, 2013 • Photography

The end of the year looms and with it, a selection of calendars made out of dead trees. I never thought I would find a use for them with the great offerings from Apple and Google, among others, to keep my life in order, but I’ve found a certain comfort looking at a paper offering that only contains things relevant to a certain, private, aspect of my life. As a result, I’m always on the lookout for interesting offerings — and 2014 is proving to be a pretty interesting year.

Jaroslav Wieczorkiewicz, a London-based photog who specializes in high-speed photography, is bringing us a nostalgic upgrade to pinup calendars of old — using milk. Well-versed in working with liquids and high-speed photography, Wieczorkiewicz took more than 200 frames for each image and layered them turning the milk being poured on the models into their outfits.

“This time I thought it will be cool to approach the liquid theme in a more relaxed and funny way,” Wieczorkiewicz wrote on his blog. “So we threw some colors into the mix and came up with a personal Milky PinUp tribute to my favorite pin-up style artists.”

Jaroslav Wieczorkiewicz's Milky PinUps

Information about purchasing one of these limited edition calendars will be made available at the end of the month. Meanwhile from Romania comes the follow-up to the controversial Orthodox Calendar, an offering that last year caused waves online for its depiction of highly sexualized and homoerotic scenes of the Orthodox Church.

“The calendar is the brainchild of a group composed mostly of Orthodox eastern Europeans of the former communist region,” the Orthodox Calendar site reads. “The primary goal was to demonstrate that Orthodox believers do not all fit the backward, hidebound stereotype portrayed in the press but rather are regular people with passions, preferences, interests and desires. At the same time, the calendar takes an ironic approach to the Orthodox Church itself, which in recent years has been embroiled in corruption scandals, artist repression, gay sex cover-ups, outrageous behavior and homophobia.”

The creators seek to “counteract the negative and outdated influences of most of the Orthodox church leadership. While recognizing that change might not come quickly to the official Orthodox church position, [the team behind Orthodox Calendar] nonetheless believes that at least it can encourage people (believers or not) to reflect and realize that their speech / ideas no longer fit modern society.”

Orthodox Calendar

The calendar depicts images of hunky men surrounded by religious imagery, with occasional images that show support for gay marriage. It is available on their site for USD$22.69.