PH & HBA

PH & HBA sets Pieter Hugo's portrait practice to work on the archive of Hood by Air, photographing a cast of the label's own community wearing pieces pulled from its history.

Shot in early 2016, the series casts male porn actors alongside Gully Queens, a gay community in Kingston, Jamaica that takes its name from the drains and gullies where its members have lived after being driven from their homes. Dressed in seminal HBA archive pieces, the sitters read as a kind of collective portrait of the label's own outsider affinities rather than a conventional fashion shoot. The book adds an in-conversation essay between Hugo and Carlos Nazario, a collaborator on the project and a longtime friend of Hood by Air founder Shayne Oliver. Designed by Joseph Burrin, the edition runs 56 pages at 290 x 375 mm, softcover with a jacket, limited to 500 copies.

Hugo, a South African photographer known for portraiture that treats marginalized and stigmatized communities with the same formal weight as fashion or celebrity subjects, brings that approach directly into a fashion-house collaboration here, closing the distance between his documentary and commercial work.