Ibrahim Kamara on Photography as a Powerful Force for Change

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2020

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The renowned stylist and fashion director talks to BoF’s Editor-at-Large Tim Blanks about his time creating under lockdown. Quarantine hasn’t stopped stylist and art director Ibrahim Kamara from creating. Although he is unable to work on his usual fantastical fashion visuals, the time spent in his London home is nonetheless far from wasted. “I might not be able to achieve my dreams right now, but I can write them and make a note of them,” Kamara told BoF’s Editor-at-Large Tim Blanks in the latest episode of the BoF Podcast. Born in Sierra Leone, Kamara moved to London in his early teens. He has since worked with some of fashion’s biggest names, including Stella McCartney, Fenty and Hermès as well as British Vogue, Love and AnOther. During lockdown, Kamara and Blanks touched base to talk about photography as a force for change.

Kamara’s ethereal aesthetic pays tribute both to his West African roots and to London, the city he has lived in for the past ten years. For Kamara, the beauty of his visuals exist in this intersection of cultures. “When I’m making work, I want people to stop and take in so much,” he said. “If an image doesn’t stop you, it doesn’t really do it’s job… That’s how I make photos, I want people to look at them twice.”
Kamara sees technology as a source of endless inspiration. It is through Instagram he met and befriended Kristin-Lee Moolman, one of Kamara’s longtime collaborators, with whom he has worked on countless projects. “It’s so good to find people who you think can bring something to your world,” he said. Social media has also upended fashion’s longstanding hierarchies, Kamara said, adding that people can now more easily collaborate on ambitious projects without the approval and support of established magazines.
Looking to the future, Kamara hopes to inspire a new generation of young image-makers to find confidence in their ways of seeing and believe in their creative visions. Only by supporting, cultivating and promoting the next generation of creative talent can the fashion industry progress: “[I want to] push the industry [forward]… and make it a space where everyone can dream.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Threadup, the largest online consignment in Thrift Store, is helping brands tap into fashion's fastest growing industry.
0:06.9	Find out why Gap, Reformation, and more are joining the resale revolution at Threadup.com slash B-O-F.
0:15.6	No matter how big a brand is, a brand needs culture. It meets the kids in the streets to lost after it.
0:23.3	You do say, should we look at the past and learn from that?
0:26.2	Or should we continue in this direction of uncertainty and hope that it is all a dream we will one day wake up from?
0:32.6	I don't believe the world need pen of meat doing the same thing.
0:35.6	I think it's great that everyone can bring
0:37.6	something just a little bit different because we all dream differently. Hi, this is Imran Ahmed,
0:43.1	founder and CEO of the business of fashion and welcome to the Bof podcast. Early on in the lockdown,
0:49.5	our editor at large sat down with the talented stylist Ib Kamara for an episode of B-O-F-Live.
0:56.6	Tim learned about Ibb's upbringing and his approach to creating some of the most
1:01.0	arresting and interesting fashion images over the past few years.
1:05.4	Here's Ip. Kamara inside fashion.
1:24.6	Oh, Kamara inside fashion. I don't know how I would describe it actually, but he's had a huge impact on my love of fashion imagery over the last few years. He's actually revitalized my love of magazines,
1:29.5	and I'm not going to blow any more smoke.
1:31.9	I'm just going to ask it, hello, I'm welcome.
1:35.1	How would you describe yourself?
1:37.5	I would say I'm still sort of growing,
1:41.0	and what's the English?
1:51.5	I'm evolving. I think every time I make a photo, I'm learning something new. So I'm still very happy to make work. I don't know if that sort of answers
2:00.3	your question. As a stylist, an art director.
2:02.6	As a art director, as an image maker, as a thinker, as a writer, I think I'm still like
	...

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