Daniele Tamagni Exhibition

Danziger Gallery

poster for Daniele Tamagni Exhibition

This event has ended.

Daniele Tamagni is an Italian photographer based in Milan and London. For the last few years, he has documented African and Caribbean communities worldwide, exploring culture, religion, music, fashion, and art. In 2007, he began work on Peckham Rising, a project organized with Paul Goodwin, the cross-cultural curator at the Tate Britain which explored black urbanism in Peckham, London.

He then traveled to the Atlantic coast of Africa to document the little know sub-culture of the sapeurs or La SAPE - a French acronym for La Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes.
The sapeurs, as they are called, sport ostentatiously dapper suits and fedoras. They have made fashion their religion, living an elegant lifestyle in direct reference to the French colonialism that contributed to the abject poverty of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sapeurism is a means of dealing with this past, by appropriating western styles into their own. A code of conduct dictates to sapeurs not to wear more than three colors in any outfit, to always wear original brands (almost exclusively French and Italian labels), and to not only look but also to behave in an elegant manner.

This work resulted in Tamagni's debut book, Gentlemen of Bacongo, (Trolley Books, 2009) which became a seminal style volume. The designer Paul Smith even based an entire collection around the book. "My aim," said Tamagni, "was to produce a portfolio which might generate a critical reflection about the identity of these people who consider elegance their main reason for existence inside a social reality so different and distant from our society." This project awarded Tamagni Best Portfolio at the Canon Young Photographer Awards in 2007, and in 2010, Tamagni received the ICP Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion photography.

Media

Schedule

from July 14, 2011 to September 10, 2011

Artist(s)

Daniele Tamagni

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