The first edition of Renell Medrano’s Ice Magazine was styled as “the coldest magazine on earth” for good reason. Inspired by Medrano’s collections of Players magazines—a ’70s publication often nicknamed the Black Playboy—the first issue reclaimed Black sensuality with a cast of women of all body shapes (and nail lengths) from Medrano’s home city, New York.
The Dominican American, New York–based photographer—who has shot everyone from Solange and Kendrick Lamar to Bad Bunny, Lorde, and Swag-era Justin Bieber and family—has now set her sights on the women of Atlanta for issue two. They’re the Georgia Peaches, with rap superstar Eve among them.
The first issue was ambitious and freewheeling. Medrano breezily put out a casting call for a not-yet-fully-formed project, and over 500 women turned up. She photographed 30 of them and called Ice a magazine. For issue two, Medrano wanted to spend more time with each model and (agonizingly) picked nine.
Her first trip to Atlanta was for another job, but it ended up being a pretty quintessential Atlanta experience. “I was with the client, and they just said, ‘Okay, let’s go to a strip club,’” she says. “From the first time, I was obsessed. Coming back, I wanted to forge more of a connection with the women I saw, who I feel are raw and real in the same way as the women I grew up around in the Bronx. I feel that hustle and spirit.”
The magazine features sleek black-and-white and cool-toned photography of girls with sculptural hair, animal-print makeup, latex bodysuits, and black netted veils playing video vixens, phone line operators, cartoonish characters, and go-go girls. There’s also an Ice word search and offbeat, vintage-looking ads for hair care within the pages.
The shoot with Eve sees her stare straight to camera in a hooded black Alexander McQueen jacket, a plunging R&M Leathers bodysuit, and Louboutins. “Eve is a dream,” says Medrano. Swizz Beatz introduced the two. “I learned to ride a motorcycle because of her. She’s an OG Ice girl to me, a badass and a boss.”
Ice works with an all-female crew, among them first-issue collaborators Raisa Flowers, Marika-Ella Ames, and hairstylist Amidat Giwa. “We’re able to flow together in this very authentic way,” Medrano says.
The team set out to, in Medrano’s words, “elevate the Atlanta girl.” “I was thinking about that first strip-club trip and seeing the girls, thinking it was a real ‘pick your player’ moment,” she says. “We had a lot of fun with that idea on set, having the girls play these characters.”
Throughout the magazine, models are asked for their definition of beauty and what being an Ice girl means in their world. “Being an Ice girl to me feels like being unapologetic,” offers one, named Seun. “And honestly, it feels like being a girl’s girl as well.”
“Being an Ice girl means to be yourself, to understand that you are that girl,” says another, Grace. “No matter what you’ve been through. No matter who hasn’t believed in you.”
“I made this magazine firstly because I wanted to highlight the around-the-way girls that I grew up around—that style, that attitude and energy, that I thought was beautiful but was not something I often saw in magazines,” explains Medrano. “So the second issue builds that out with these girls’ own ideals. There’s so much beauty, not just in the looks but in what we admire and value in each other. Giving power to the woman’s gaze is so much bigger than me. This started as an extension of me, and I feel like we’re really building a community.”
For future issues, Medrano hopes to go international, exploring Europe and South America to cast locations and women. Inspiration stays with her roots, though; she’s still very much a Tumblr girl and continuously scouts in her home streets. As Medrano says: “I can live and work anywhere in the world, and I’ll still find that beauty in the women of the Bronx that inspires me to seek out more on the daily.” Ice girls coming to your city, soon.
Ice Magazine volume two, The Atlanta Issue, is produced by Ice Studios and published by Idea Books.
