Artist Statement:

THERE IS A PLACE IN HELL FOR ME AND MY FRIENDS

There's a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends is a series of head and shoulder identikit style portraits of my friends and me, all of whom call South Africa home. Through a digital process of converting colour images to black and white while manipulating the colour channels, I emphasize the pigment (melanin) in my sitters' skin so they appear heavily marked by blemishes and sun damage. The resulting portraits are the antithesis of the airbrushed images that constitute the canons of beauty in popular culture, and expose the contradictions of racial distinctions based on skin colour. As the critic Aaron Schuman writes, "although at first glance we may look '...