A project by fine art and fashion photographers and models with Down’s syndrome is challenging concepts of beauty
Actor Sarah Gordy MBE stands on a pedestal, half-turned to face the camera. Her dress – red, sequinned, elaborate – spills and pools around her feet. Gordy’s expression, captured by fashion photographer Zuzia Zawada, is serene. The image is taken from forthcoming photography book Radical Beauty Project. Shot by leading fashion and art photographers, it’s a unique proposition: all of the models, Gordy included, have Down’s syndrome. But this isn’t some uplifting charity coffee-table tome: creative director Daniel Vais wants to make high art. Which means the images are provocative, unsettling and, at times, difficult. “I didn’t necessarily want crowd-pleasing images,” Vais explains. “Some people find that disturbing. They don’t want to empower people with Down’s syndrome. They don’t see them as powerful people. So they resist it.”
Vais, an Israeli-born choreographer, didn’t mean for his collaborations with the Down’s syndrome community to become his life’s work: it just happened that way. In addition to Radical Beauty Project, Vais’s company of Down’s syndrome dancers, Culture Device, will be taking up a residency at the Royal Opera House next month, and Drag Syndrome, a spin-off featuring drag kings and queens, has plans for a world tour. The idea for Radical Beauty Project came to Vais as he was walking down the street one day. “I started to see images of people with Down’s syndrome modelling extraordinary clothes with extraordinary photographers. I saw the title of the book, and I went home and wrote it down.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2X7PAkJ
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