The artist and fashion photographer Tom Leather (* 1976) combines African and German perspectives in his poetic photographic works to an intercultural picture of body and fashion. On the motif of the veil, Leather sets itself against opposites and contradictions that shape the image of women in West Africa, and at the same time questions Western ideas of femininity, beauty and self-determination.
The picture series "exchange" was created in 2016 in cooperation with Senegalese top models such as Khady Ba, Yama Seck, Damele and many more.
Under Leaher's direction, the women stage themselves under a blood-red cloth in glistening hotel pools. In the water, their veiled bodies start to vibrate: Sometimes they appear as a graceful figure, sometimes as a powerful, expressive form. The interplay of movement, material and water dissolves boundaries and fixed attributions.
Tom Leather's gaze, abstract enough, transforms women into contemporary icons. Concepts such as Beuys social sculpture or Christos wrappings are echoed in his work. The photographs translate the view of 'the foreign in the familiar' into a new symbolic language at the interface between photography, art and fashion. Tom Leather studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and was a master student of Ottmar Hörl.