London’s Many Faces: Capturing Beauty On The Streets Of Hackney

As a kid grow­ing up in Spain, there was always a cam­era lying around my house. When I was about 12, there was a school trip where I need­ed to take one with me. So I picked it up and that start­ed the inter­est – but it wasn’t real­ly seri­ous then. As the years went by, new cam­eras start­ed com­ing out, MySpace and Tum­blr became a thing. Being sur­round­ed by so much imagery made me want to cre­ate my own visu­als, too.

I didn’t real­ly think I was going to do it as a career. I thought you couldn’t do pho­tog­ra­phy for a liv­ing. My par­ents were like that, too: ​‘You can’t do that, it’s not real­is­tic.’ It wasn’t until I had heart surgery five years ago that I decid­ed to focus on what I real­ly want­ed to do. It was a ​‘do or die’ sit­u­a­tion: ​‘I lived through this, so I have to do it.’ I haven’t looked back since.

As a fash­ion pho­tog­ra­ph­er, I work with mod­els of colour. I feel they are under­rep­re­sent­ed in both the media and in the fash­ion indus­try. When I find peo­ple who go against how they’re ​‘sup­posed’ to look and accept their own beau­ty – their hair, their skin – I see that as an act of rebel­lion, because they’re choos­ing not to fol­low the rules that soci­ety is giv­ing them. When I select mod­els, 99.9 per cent of the time, I’m look­ing to chal­lenge society’s idea of what beau­ty is.

With this kind of rebel­lion, it’s about rep­re­sen­ta­tion: to show every­one that they are accept­ed in soci­ety. If you push out the same kind of image all of the time, peo­ple are going to think that they have to look that way. That’s how I felt when I was younger. Part of the rea­son I do what I do is so that oth­er peo­ple don’t feel that they’re not accepted.

My gran is from Zim­bab­we. Rid­ley Road mar­ket, in Lon­don, reminds me of there. The lit­tle shops they have, with peo­ple sell­ing cooked food, fresh fruit and veg, the butch­ers, the fish­mon­gers, it reminds me of being back in Zim­bab­we. You’ve got places like Peck­ham, too, which they call Lit­tle Lagos. I love that – hold­ing onto small busi­ness­es, mak­ing it a melt­ing pot of cul­tures. These com­mu­ni­ties are inde­pen­dent. It makes sense to shoot there.

I don’t lis­ten to author­i­ty. I hate hav­ing to fol­low the rules. Obvi­ous­ly, with the fash­ion indus­try, there are cer­tain guide­lines which I don’t fol­low. Don’t get me wrong, things are improv­ing. Slow­ly, but it is changing. 

Doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy, con­flict pho­tog­ra­phy – these things are no joke. They cap­ture an issue. I try and do that through fash­ion. For me, even with fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy, if we can’t tell a sto­ry with the images, then there’s no real point. Edi­to­r­i­al shoots are fun, but there should always be a mes­sage behind it. Oth­er­wise, there’s no real point. 

Pho­tog­ra­phy: © Shin­gi Rice

Read more sto­ries from This Is Off The Wall, an edi­to­r­i­al part­ner­ship from Huck and Vans.

This sto­ry was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 2019.

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