W'Happen

This book presents defining images from 1990s British fashion photography. Edited by Jason Evans and including pioneering work by Elaine Constantine, Corinne Day, Nick Knight, Marc Lebon, Craig McDean, Nigel Shafran, David Sims and Wolfgang Tillmans.

WHAPPEN, AGAIN

I was encouraged to make Whappen by Val Williams, one of the UK’s most innovative, supportive and genre defying photography curators. At that time I was assisting her at the short-lived but groovy Shoreditch Biennial as she put together a survey show of late twentieth century British fashion photography called ‘Look at me’. She showed me how to make a book (with Tom Hingston’s help) and Levis stumped up the money to print it.

I tried to collect together an extensive range of work from what was historically sealed in the ‘grunge’ fashion era, notorious for ‘heroin chic’. The point of Whappen was to broaden the debate, to show that the range of documentary style photographic responses in the early 90s was a much broader, more idiosyncratic and less nostalgic phenomenon than the appointed flag bearers and their associate stylists were held responsible for.

As 80s ‘references’ have been bled dry in a visual culture fuelled on pre-ordained consumption those ‘in the know’ are turning to the 90s for an alternative visual fix. Similarly, we are witnessing a new cult of yearning for perceived authenticity and ‘heritage’, a disingenuous disguise in this time of social crisis. Look beyond the aesthetic surface of the work in Whappen and consider it’s various levels of engagement and critique, it’s definition in opposition and it’s responses to a shifting economic and political landscape, not unlike the ones we are witnessing here and now.