Wednesday 9 May 2018

Teenage Precinct Shoppers / Nigel Shafran




Edition : First / New York / Dashwood Books / 2013 / Softcover. / VG+
8vo, Unpaginated (60pp). Printed wraps. Numerous Colour and Black & White plates. One of 500 copies. Small closed tear top spine.

The legendary Shafran project gets a proper printing. There are two series of portraits of teenagers combined here, a black and white series shot in Ilford town centre in the suburbs of East London which originally appeared in I-D magazine in 1990 and had an influence on a whole generation of London based photographers in the early nineties for it's stripped down no frills approach to portraiture and fashion. The second color series was shot both in Ilford Town Center and Brent Cross Shopping Centre, a shopping precinct (a British term for mall). As in all Shafran's work none of the details seem trivial. Instead the choices these teenagers make in hair and make-up in clothes and attitude reveal a sense of profundity.