“I want to show that you can create everything out of anything, anywhere and everywhere as long as you have your creativity,” says Imruh Asha of his crafty new book
Paper is such a commonplace material it’s easy to take it for granted – that is, until it is wrapped and swaddled around humans to create otherworldly “monster” figures à la stylist and designer Imruh Asha. “It started when my friend and fellow designer Marco Ribeiro gave me a book about paper costumes a couple of years ago,” reflects Asha on the origins of his fantastical series. “It was basically a tutorial on how to turn paper into costumes.” His papered universe, which first came to life as part of an editorial with photographer Osma Harvilahti for Ssaw magazine (and then went viral), has recently been formalised into a book, Paper Monsters, published in collaboration with Edwin Sberro of Exhibition Studio.
The book is comprised of photographs shot by Carlijn Jacobs, Harvilahti and Asha himself across locations as diverse as Paris, the USA and Brazil. Swathes of bold-coloured paper were torn, crumpled, rolled and wrapped around the models to create incongruous shapes, fixating the gaze on the strange beauty of the unfamiliar silhouettes within their contrasted settings. “In each place we went, we tried to find colourful backdrops to contrast with the paper tubes,” explains Asha. “I look at it as a whole image – the paper is a more abstracted shape in ordinary spaces.” The majority of photographs are shot with natural light; his striking Paris series, for example, was taken “around 6am with the beautiful golden light on the Parisian streets.”
The hypnotic power of the images is not just in Asha’s creative use of material but also in his manipulation of colour. By transforming, often masking, the human figure underneath, the points of connection to each “paper monster” are so cleverly opened to the universality of Asha’s chosen material and then siphoned through the personal experience of colour. “For me, colour has to do with expression,” explains Imruh of the intentional shades chosen. “Every colour has its own message. Wearing red has such a different message as wearing yellow, for example.” That being said, the generally vivid palette of each series casts the images with a warming aura of playfulness, of gentle joy, stirring the imagination.
“By definition, the Latin monstrum is also that which generates attention and compels awareness,” writes cultural analyst and semiotician Luca Marchetti, in one of several essays included in the publication. “Transforming appearances through form, colour, contrast, and the construction of the entire image.” And this is exactly what Asha achieves by using as democratic a material as paper for this project. “I want to show the audience that you can create everything out of anything, anywhere and everywhere,” he says, “as long as you have your creativity.”
Paper Monsters by Imruh Asha is published by Exhibition Studio, and is out now.
