Faith-Ann Young’s photographs turn life into a spectacle, fashion and art converge in a magic realist state of high expectation and sensuality, each portrait lush, vibrant and sexy.
Bold colours and dramatic backdrops are a familiar feature in Young’s pictures. Her love of surrealism, romanticism, decadence and the strong imagery in the paintings of Frida Kahlo and novels of Isabel Allende continually inspire her on a journey through a landscape of magic, colour and poetry populated by strange and wonderful characters full of bon viveur.
Young currently has a show, ‘Eat Cake’ in Los Angeles and while her latest portraits of the French performance troupe, ‘House Of Drama’, are wonderful it’s her earlier pictures of the New York nightclub scene that I adore. There is an earthiness to the photographs, an alluring beauty that is utterly captivating, the saturated colours, harsh lights and confident poses conspire to pull you in to the netherworld of Gotham, a cinematic construct that hides beneath the surface of our everyday reality.
Young’s great contribution to photography is her manipulation of reality, of making us believe in a parallel world that is larger, brighter, fuller, than our own. Like the Magic Realists who inspire her Young gives us a picture of a world we will never see yet know intimately. Here’s what she has to say about her work:
Faith-Ann Young crafts photos that have a universal familiarity while chasing classically American idealized motifs: fantasy, rebellion, and freedom.
Known for bold colors and eccentric muses, she gravitates towards portraiture of society’s iconoclasts, rebels, underbelly dwellers, ingénues and performance artists, often drenched in the Cali sun – like a West Coast counterpart to Nan Goldin or Ryan McGinley.
Faith-Ann Young’s latest exhibition ‘Eat Cake’ is on until 1st December @ The Space 650, 650 Sunset Avenue, Venice, California