Description: SOLD OUT
De-industrialisation has left towns in South Wales impoverished and seemingly frozen in time. Moved to action by this stasis, and inspired by the local people, Charlotte James, a creative director and stylist who works with international clients like Helmut Lang and Stella McCartney from her hometown of Merthyr Tydfil, and Clémentine Schneidermann, a French photographer who has been living in Wales since 2012 documenting local communities (including its Elvis fans), decided to take action.
The two met in 2015, and soon began running workshops for eight-to-twelve-year-olds—James teaching the rudiments of design, tailoring, and styling—before photographing them in the mostly deprived districts where the children live. Many of the photographs seem to document some vernacular ritual; one shows what I thought, at first glance, was a group of Catholic girls dressed for First Holy Communion, or for regional variations of folk dance. But the girls, bride-like in white, have climbed onto the roof of a low concrete building, and, in another image, six kids, clad in more green fur, have convened on a housing estate in an eerie, children-of-the-damned array. If this is fashion, then the trend among these girls and (far fewer) boys is for an uncanny amalgam of childish dress-up—a girl in a laundry-bag dress, a little boy trimmed with gold tinsel—and gleeful-sinister surrealism. The workshops and the photographic series are carrying on as the models grow older: Will they lose their edge as the strictures of embarrassed adolescence set in?
Publication Date: 2016
Publisher: Arts + Minds/ECPR
Condition:
Book Size: 27 x 21cm
Pages: 46
Format: Softcover
ISBN:
Description: SOLD OUT
De-industrialisation has left towns in South Wales impoverished and seemingly frozen in time. Moved to action by this stasis, and inspired by the local people, Charlotte James, a creative director and stylist who works with international clients like Helmut Lang and Stella McCartney from her hometown of Merthyr Tydfil, and Clémentine Schneidermann, a French photographer who has been living in Wales since 2012 documenting local communities (including its Elvis fans), decided to take action.
The two met in 2015, and soon began running workshops for eight-to-twelve-year-olds—James teaching the rudiments of design, tailoring, and styling—before photographing them in the mostly deprived districts where the children live. Many of the photographs seem to document some vernacular ritual; one shows what I thought, at first glance, was a group of Catholic girls dressed for First Holy Communion, or for regional variations of folk dance. But the girls, bride-like in white, have climbed onto the roof of a low concrete building, and, in another image, six kids, clad in more green fur, have convened on a housing estate in an eerie, children-of-the-damned array. If this is fashion, then the trend among these girls and (far fewer) boys is for an uncanny amalgam of childish dress-up—a girl in a laundry-bag dress, a little boy trimmed with gold tinsel—and gleeful-sinister surrealism. The workshops and the photographic series are carrying on as the models grow older: Will they lose their edge as the strictures of embarrassed adolescence set in?
Publication Date: 2016
Publisher: Arts + Minds/ECPR
Condition:
Book Size: 27 x 21cm
Pages: 46
Format: Softcover
ISBN: