FiTH Work No.23: The Cure

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In autumn 2004 the Japanese design and culture magazine pen, asked me to create a series of style images to celebrate the opening of Dover Street Market, the new Comme des Garçons concept store in Mayfair, an affluent London district with historic architecture and boutique shops. I had recently moved to the Holloway area of north London and was very much taken by the Nag’s Head Covered Market, an old-style market hall which is open everyday of the week to provide the local community with many of its needs and indulgences, from fresh fish to cheap fabric, secondhand goods to groceries.  My intention was to style and photograph members of this local market community in Comme des Garçons Homme Autumn-Winter 2004 collection mixed with items obtained at random from stalls in the market.

Around this time, photographer Sal Idriss whom I’d worked with previously introduced me to Leo Asemota at The Fount, the studio and project space that they both ran on the Hornsey Road which is only a few minutes walk to or from the market. I was struck by a photograph in the gallery, “FiTH Work No.23: The Cure”, a large, full-length portrait featuring Asemota standing on a white 3-step plinth, dressed in a white jacket, white shirt and white bow-tie, dogtooth trousers and no shoes, against a black backdrop. This powerful, proud image made as part of his exhibition The Cure Complete Works arrested me with its directness and beauty. This was how to shoot the COMME-UNITY story for pen magazine and the way to go about it was to invite the studio to collaborate on this sitting with the magazine’s fashion editor Yuzuru Koga.

The idea was to create an 8-page story using the 3-step plinth as the unifying motif and as a simple device to elevate our subjects to just above street level. This elevated status is how many perceive Comme des Garçons and its new Dover Street market in Mayfair. But it’s still just a market selling merchandise to a community.

pen with New Attitude magazine No.142

(December 2004)

COMME des GARÇONS HOMME PLUS

Contributing editor: Yuzuru Koga

Photography: Sal Idriss / The Fount

Styling: Barry Kamen

Leo Asemota FiTH Work No.23: The Cure 2003. Chromogenic print.

We cast from the Nags Head Covered Market community: an elegant Pakistani gentleman in his fifties who owned a discount fabric stall; a handsome Turkish lad who sold cheap ‘knockoff’ sportswear; a 16 year-old Jamaican-English boy with a big ‘fro who was selling second hand bits and bobs with his mum; a styled up young Indian boy in his school uniform browsing the stalls; two Lebanese brothers from a small electrical shop; and a young Mauritian lad with flour on his face from making fresh chapatis.

The shoot was on a busy Saturday in the market and surrounding streets. We fed off the theatre and spectacle that resulted from the shoppers and traders seeing their friends and fellow stall-holders standing on a white plinth, wearing Comme des Garçons and being photographed by an English, West-African, Japanese team. Later on, we returned to The Fount where we draped the original studio wall with different fabrics obtained from the market, using it as a backdrop and shot the story’s remaining three portraits in the manner of Asemota’s picture “FiTH Work No.23: The Cure”.

Barry Kamen artist and stylist

Text © 2013

In remembrance
Barry Kamen
1963 - 2015