Brooklyn photographer, Bon Duke, exudes a sense of childlike enthusiasm, a desire and a need for exploration and experimentation that manifests itself in his conclusive photographs and shorts. Choosing photography over his original chosen art form, painting, for the instant gratification it provides, the work of Bon Duke is as intriguing as it is engaging.
Despite having the likes of The New York Times Magazine, V and Nylon on his list of employers, Bon Duke was not always integrated into the world of fashion. When the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CDFA) asked him to shoot accessories for their 2009 award ceremony, he had to Google them to find out who they were. Fast forward three years and he has co-founded the New York Fashion Film Festival and established himself as a name to know.
A veil of aesthetic darkness is draped over Duke’s work, but there is a deeper beauty he exposes that inevitably burns through. A pastel-based colour palette is tinted with dullness, a juxtaposition that allows the audience extract individual meaning palpable in a work like Cupcake. ‘What you get is what you see’ is not part of the brief, instead Duke requires the surface to be scratched. His work is an exploration of the human body, relationships, movement, love, reaction, and expectation.
It is a contemporary lens through which Bon Duke presents his world and there is little by way of sugarcoating or idolatry of the subject. The models he works with are more striking than classically beautiful. There are smears and grit, both metaphorically and physically: unpainted fingernails, free flowing hair, visible pores. His pieces are thematic, often dramatic and climactic, evoking emotion and reaction. Body movement often takes centre stage, whether it is being perpetrated by the intimate dance performed by Janie Taylor or Rumble Fish, the writhings of a half naked woman in Syrup or the fluidly jerky and animalisticaly robotic gesticulation of Savannah Wyatt.
Duke looks for beauty in places where beauty is not normally searched for, exposing what it is that lays beneath the rubble of our expectation.
