Suppose you’re looking for an artist who captures that raw, authentic and unfiltered sense of youth. In that case, you will find what you are looking for with Les: Liminal smoke breaks on the stairwell, the effervescent melodrama of the dance floor, blurred neon lights and hand-held microphones; spaces where the world melts and dissipates in the heat of sparkling adolescence.
Despite her works’ perfection, Les only recently got into photography. Their interest in photography developed in their late teens, but their focus remained on the visual arts. For her degree, Les had to purchase a camera, and it was not long before they started taking pictures outside of class of her friends and architecture. Soon, their camera began to accompany them to events, where Les would engage with creative people and new experiences, all with the camera in hand.
When asked about style, Les says they think they don’t have one, but she’s “okay with that”. If they were to develop a style, Les wants it to be tinted with nuance, which they find incredibly important. Stylistically, what Les captures is “almost always queer”. Otherwise, besides her stark and urban architectural photographs, Les gravitates toward taking pictures of people. Les wants to “highlight people as they are”, believing that the personal “gets lost in the sort of content-driven space of photography”. In her pictures, Les wants to stimulate conversation, understand people how they are; to emphasise authenticity rather than diminish it, something so powerful in youth.
Les says that they find being a young, queer person in South Africa “liberating”: She is incredibly optimistic, describing with electric ambition how excited they are to be young and in this space: “I have so much time right now, being young”, with countless stories and moments to be captured and documented. By capturing the queer lived experience, Les explains that “queer stories will live on forever”, primarily through art like photography. They are slowly shifting between creating their own queer experiences and finding parallels between their own life and the queer lives of others around them.
Youth is fleeting and “inherently experienced by everyone”. It is a time rich and decadent with experiences, ones that are rare and genuine. They are also experiences that are so integrally youthful that it is impossible to capture them later. What is important to keep in mind, Les explains, is that “the moment that we are in now won’t exist again”. Les is primarily focused on the concept of community, which “could run away” at any point; its ephemeral nature is encouraged by our current socio-political climate.
When asked what lessons she has learned in her youth, Les says, without hesitation, that one must “continue being authentic”. “It is quite easy to just be yourself,” Les explains. Challenges for this, however, do arise in the creative industry, they say, as “people put on a certain persona”, stripping artists away from that which inspired them to be creative in the first place. “Be you, be happy with it,” Les says.
Les’ work is genuinely dripping with a hysteric, elated thrill and is a testament to the young experience. Their work will remain relevant and moving. As long as their hands still hold the camera, those quick moments from your adolescence will remain held and captured, stopped in time.
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