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Fashion / The workers will wear red to the
gallows |
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By Shira Breuer |
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A great deal has been written about the
prolific connection between art and fashion. A photography exhibit
by Adi Nes, winner of the 2003 Leon Constantiner Photography Award
for an Israeli Artist, which is currently being shown at the Tel
Aviv Museum of Art, once again sheds light on the power and
uniqueness of the merging of forces between the two fields.
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photographs in the exhibition, which will close on March 20,
appeared in September in the Fall/Winter 2003 issue of the Vogue
Homme International fashion magazine for men, and were part of a
large fashion project dedicated to the Middle East, and designed to
commemorate the anniversary of September 11. The editor of the
magazine, Richard Buckley, turned to photographers from Cairo, Tel
Aviv, Beirut, Istanbul, Ramallah and Kuwait City, and invited them
to photograph a series of pictures that would reflect life in the
Middle East.
Buckley approached Nes because of the success of
previous projects of his, including the photography series
"Soldiers" and "Teenagers," which were successfully exhibited in
Israel and worldwide. As in his previous works, in the Vogue project
Nes is preoccupied with Israeli male identity, and his photographs
have a homo-erotic cast. But this time, instead of soldiers in
uniform and youth in prosaic situations in an environment
reminiscent of his native city of Kiryat Gat, the men were
photographed in a jail, and assumed the characters of prisoners and
policemen.
"The framework story of the project is prison, as
a metaphor for Israeli society," says Nes. "A prison that contains a
representation of population groups in Israel. I decided to
photograph people from real life, not models, as part of the concept
that fashion is a part of life. The project deals with male identity
and image. I wanted to deviate from the regular format of models who
are wearing clothes."
Those photographed in the pictures are
men who were approached by Nes, including an employee in an
advertising agency, the Man of the Year of the magazine Hazman
Havarod (The Pink Time) - the Israel monthly magazine for gays and
lesbians - as well as Chinese workers and teenagers from Jaffa. Nes
chose the clothing for the project together with British stylist
Paul Mather, whom Vogue assigned to him. After intensive e-mail
correspondence, says Nes, "Mather came to Israel with four suitcases
full of clothes."
In some of the photographs the clothes look
quite ordinary. In a photograph of a boy from Jaffa who is
confronting a policeman in uniform, for example, the boy is wearing
a leather jacket that looks like an old item of clothing that has
been through a lot, but is actually a new jacket with a worn look,
brought by Mather from the Valentino fashion house. In the group
photo of the prisoners, on the other hand, one can already detect
details that give away the fact that they are wearing prestigious
designer clothes.
"My point of view is very ironic," Nes
says. "I did reserve duty in the Ketziot Prison in Ansar, and I saw
the prisoners walking between the fences of the camp. I made the
transfer from the fashion show catwalk to the route of the
prisoners' morning walk, including the line up, which looks like the
way the models are posed on the ramp at the end of the fashion
show."
In other pictures - like those in which a pair of
twins is seen wearing military-style shirts by Kenzo, or three
Chinese workers wear red clothes by Paul Smith, looking like
condemned men - the clothes already become like uniforms. "I wanted
to examine what happens when the fashion element is copied many
times, because then it becomes a uniform," Nes says. "It comes from
my background, because when I was growing up in Kiryat Gat in the
1980s, the entire town was very influenced by the Polgat clothing
factory, and everyone bought Ligat clothes [Polgat's everyday
clothing line] with discount coupons and wore the same thing. I
remember that I cut the collars of my shirts and made an effort to
have my clothes `look different.'" | |
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The photos by Adi Nes deal with male identity and
image. |
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