From Salvador to Münster, Ygor Bahia’s photographic practice embraces a raw yet tender documentation of queer bodies
Ygor Bahia is a young talent whose work currently explores queer identities. He was born in Salvador, where as a child he was drawn to visuals and aesthetics. It was during his undergraduate degree in 2017 that he took up photography to create the street style project Calçada, which helped him realise his passion for creating images. For the past three years he’s been based in Münster, Germany, where he’s been studying Visual Anthropology, Media and Documentary Practices at the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität.
For most of this time Bahia did not pursue photography, but in the middle of 2020 he picked up his Minolta X-700 camera and started shooting again. His current approach is quite different from the one he practiced back home. While in Brazil the focus was on the street, urban life and clothing, in Germany the artist started planning shoots with a stronger homoerotic language featuring nude models — mostly his own friends.
“Salvador is an extremely sensorial city, it is impossible to grow there and not be affected by it”
“I am more and more interested in the idea of self-performance, so shootings conceived in an environment that is more intimate make more sense to me at the moment,” he says. For Bahia, photographing has given him the possibility to understand how people deal with their own image, the impact this has on their self-esteem and perception of themselves.
“The experience of living abroad has tightened my bonds to the queer community, which has provided me with a second family in the absence of my natural habitat,” he continues. “This context has made me want to shoot my friends with a gaze that’s more blatantly queer, putting these bodies and how they relate to their surroundings as a central topic. Parallel to that, came a deeper dive into the world of ballroom and a growing interest in how its aesthetics relate to its politics. I want to explore the role that clothes play in our performative behaviour as queer people.”
Although Bahia lives abroad, Brazil and Latin America still run through his work from his experience in Salvador and how issues related to the country are reflected in the city. "Salvador is an extremely sensorial city, it is impossible to grow there and not be affected by it,” Bahia says. "Somehow, in Salvador my photography ended up being quite particular, more raw than we usually see in fashion magazine editorials. And I believe that this look will always permeate my work in some way.”
Words Ode
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From Brazil, With Love And Optic Games is a Nataal series spearheaded by Ode, a São Paulo-based stylist, writer and independent curator. Brazil, which has the largest black population outside the African continent, is home to a new generation of young black photographers who are creating fresh perspectives on fashion and art. This series of interviews sees Ode explore how their work both expands ideas around representation and participation and challenges Western perspectives that ignore the Global South as part of black life and diasporic conversations
Read our other stories in this series here.
Published on 18/03/2021