Jason Evans, stylist Simon Foxton[no title] 1991

Jason Evans, working under the pseudonym ‘Travis’, was one of a number of photographers whose work first appeared in the new fashion and lifestyle magazines that emerged in the 1990s. These publications worked to blur the boundaries between art, fashion and life, and championed a new sort of realism in fashion photography, where photographers drew inspiration from street and youth culture, capturing the authentic, ordinary and everyday.

This photograph, taken as part of Evans’s first fashion shoot, is from the series Strictly, which was originally published in 1991 in London-based i-D magazine. Each work in the series depicts a young black man standing on a suburban street. Shown full-length, and directly facing the viewer, Evan’s models wear impassive expressions and strike neutral poses. Evans was interested in the nineteenth-century notion of the dandy at the time of making these images, and saw the men as exemplifying contemporary flaneurs. As is common in contemporary commercial photography, Evans worked with a stylist, Simon Foxton (born 1961), in producing the series of images… (read more)