Conceptual artist, director, photographer, and unconventional publisher: Max Siedentopf is a figure impossible to categorize. Born in 1991, he has already made a mark with a career that spans fashion, contemporary art, visual communication, and viral projects. Founder of Ordinary magazine, Emmy Award winner, and close collaborator of Gucci, Max is known for his playful and nonconformist approach that challenges the conventions of every discipline he touches. Today we’re talking about one of his projects from 2017: SNAKE, CAKE, LAKE, AWAKE, FAKE, RAKE, STEAK, DRAKE, SHAKE — designed to bring together different creatives and opposing worlds.
It’s one of his most surreal and innovative works, introduced with a tongue-twisting title: SNAKE, CAKE, LAKE, AWAKE, FAKE, RAKE, STEAK, DRAKE, SHAKE. A project that, like all of Max’s work, starts with a simple idea and transforms into a collaborative experiment that crosses languages, continents, and disciplines.
It all begins with a list of rhyming words. Max, the project’s “creative captain,” hands this sequence — snake, cake, lake, awake, and so on — to Uruguayan photographer JP Bonino, who works out of Buenos Aires. The instructions? Minimal but open: a few hand-drawn sketches and a clear message — «maybe you can make them more fun or weird ;-)» as they told It’s Nice That back in 2017. An invitation to creative freedom that perfectly defines Max’s visual universe.
Bonino, known for his ironic and unconventional photographic style, accepts the challenge and produces a series of surreal, evocative, and bizarre images. The project doesn’t stop there: after him, the images go to poet and illustrator Anna Haifisch, who interprets them with poetic texts, and finally to web developer Rifke Sadleir, who turns them into an interactive website. The final result is a multisensory and multidisciplinary journey, where visual art, poetry, and technology intertwine in a flow of collective creativity.
Max Siedentopf loves the absurd and the unpredictable. His goal isn’t just to create beautiful images but to craft visual ideas that make people think, smile, or simply feel confused. «Most fashion photography is just beautiful, but it lacks an idea,» he said in the same interview with It’s Nice That.
With Bonino, already in 2017, he had found an ideal partner to push the boundaries of the medium, even going so far as to propose deliberately over-the-top ideas just to see how far the photographer would go. The result is a work that doesn’t seek definitions but offers a different way of seeing and thinking — even back in 2017. Like much of Max’s work, this project is as much a visual piece as it is a conceptual provocation.
