NASTAJA FOURIE AND THE INSIDE OUT SOULS

There's a saying today that fashion, nowadays, is wearing your soul on the outside. But to which extent can the soul be publishable to the point where you can wear it outside? A shoe that suggests us a personality? A family jewel? A fabric that reveals a certain preference for natural products? Definately, these aren't the days of massified fashion, but of an industry that presents us with flexible tendencies, which are highly personalized.

Natasja Fourie swears she spent her youth in schools for models in South Africa, but it's impossible to know which youth she's refering to, at the height of her 22 years of age. She spent hours drawing on every sort of surface, she wanted to become an archaeologist, to travel the world, but she's been travelling through the sidewalks of photography instead. For Natasja, the limits of transfiguration of the soul outside the body can go far beyond the choice of the colour of a pair of stockings and, as such, she intensely seeks, in her studios, the exposure of the inside of the people she's photographing.

This doesn't always imply tranquility; Fourie has a good eye for certain types of wickedness and doesn't shy away from exploring ridiculous, shameful or even ugly details in her models. That's certainly why her first pictures seem quite documentary; she brought her own friends into the spotlight, creating extremely powerful, daring and vibrant caricatures.

Another shining example of a young artist whose talent was revealed thorugh the Internet (it all started with her personal blogue, which has been deleted); the young lady now lives in London, where she is undertaking other work, such as video editing. Natasja Fourie's work subverts what we have known about fashion photography and opens our eyes to a more extreme study about our time, when every object must be used over us in order to point out and publish who we are.