SINGAPORE STREET FASHION
Weekend Knack magazine, Nikon and PGAV Photo Gallery in Brussels wrote out a nationwide competition to all Belgian photographers between the age of 18 and 35 (Weekend Photo Award #1) in June 2008. The winning prizes were big and the recognition even bigger. The theme was street fashion, which seems simple at first, but has many possible interpretations. I decided to take my Lomo LC-A equipped with a Colorsplash flash out on the town and shoot people on the streets of Singapore City (where I was on holiday at the time). The concept was to consistently double expose street textures and lines over fashionably dressed people that caught my eye on the street; allowing the street arrows, lines and textures to be physically present in the clothes. The idea was to melt the clothes and the street into a single frame that represented my vision on street fashion. The pictures have a voyeuristic and almost paparazzi feel to them. It's the feeling we are all daily confronted with when living in a big city. Interestingly some of the people seem to evoke a victimized expression, as if they were reluctantly dependent on their materialistic possessions. The people photographed are wearing new, spotless designer clothes as if they were on a real fashion shoot. The women have an allure reminiscent of mass media advertising. To which extent has consumption, mass media, capitalism and public perception changed the urban landscape of South-East Asia and its ever-growing cities?
My work was selected as one of the nine finalists being the only analogue entry without models or stylists, pure street photography. A selection was exhibited at the PGAV Photo Gallery, Brussels October 2008.
