DEAN FREEMAN - FUNKYTOWN
FREEMAN, DEAN
FunkyTown brings together, for the first time in book form, all Dean Freemans fashion, costume, celebrity and reportage shots collected over about thirty years: he initially focused his lens on London youth culture in the 80s and subsequently captured an extraordinary world rich in people and situations in the most disparate parts of the globe.
Having achieved fame with his successful book about David Beckham (more than a million copies sold), Dean Freeman momentarily abandons the well known star system and dips generously into his immense and still partly unseen photographic archives. The special nature of this album lies in the contrast produced by the unusual propinquity of subjects belonging to very different contexts. So on the same page we see a Vietnamese refugee and a carefree Hollywood teenager; the perfect bodies of pop singers and the realer ones of the many-coloured suburban fans who try to imitate them. So everything blends into a journey where the myth of western well-being is obscured by decidedly dramatic realities such as for example the misery and exploitation of child workers. From North America to Nepal, following an order that is only apparently random, he mixes everything into a simultaneous flow of images which is our own contemporaneousness.
Born in London in 1963, Dean Freeman has had a great influence on contemporary visual culture, becoming an icon maker of models, writers and showbiz personalities. FunkyTown is introduced by Simon Kelner, editor in chief of the British newspaper The Independent.
