The Arts & Culture Journal

Photographer Oscar Nao speaks to Fallyrag about the dark beauty behind his work.

"I'm a London based photographer with an academic training, just graduated 3 years ago. Before that I had already started taking photos in the mid 90's with a camera I bought with stolen money.

Fast-forward to 2009 and here I am trying to reclaim the figure of the outcast and its importance in bringing a sense of violence and danger to society, something that in my opinion is totally lost nowadays. The main aim of my work is to create a banner for anything that exists on the fringes of society and throw it into the face of mainstream. It’s a call to arms to all misfits.

In conveying this message I pay a special attention to the visual side of it, showing that there’s beauty in the squalor, showing human's darker side as a form of beauty, making the bleak and miserable exquisite; but always keeping a sense of accessibility and sunken beauty to the images.

Some of the photographs are just comments on different subjects like: gender politics, witchcraft, body dysmorphia, religion, pop culture.

“The subjects I photograph stand for what I idolise in life, things that reek of sleaze, low rent glamour and cutting-edge loneliness; they represent the opposite of a gentrified, cut clean society, and this is what makes them exciting and dangerous. They get across, to a certain extent, aspects of life usually rendered socially invisible and that is why, as some kind of avenging act, I try to make the final image look as iconic as possible, as the perfect poster on a teenager's bedroom wall. The subjects represent for the audience the contradiction between wanting to look away and not being able to stop looking, the abhorrence of the raw and the attraction of the outlawed. I'm not interested in trying to make the audience empathise with the