The words you are searching are inside this book. To get more targeted content, please make full-text search by clicking here.
Discover the best professional documents and content resources in AnyFlip Document Base.
Search
Published by nmestas, 2017-12-21 14:21:27

21 Dec GALLEY

21 Dec GALLEY

LUKE AUSTIN

LÉ. WÀ
beautiful
MILOŠ MESTAS







LUKE AUSTIN

LÉ. WÀ
beautiful

MILOŠ MESTAS





E. wà by Kó. lá Túbò. sún

The Yorùbá concept of beauty is encompassing: a graceful neck here, slender or
strong arms there, or a head full of hair or a bald one. Tribal marks and other facial
scarifications are another dimension (although these have other social and political
functions). The last leg of this trifecta of our estimation of beauty is character, also
called ìwà/ìwàpè. lé. or o. mo. lúàbí. As the Yorùbá strongly believe, ìwà le.wà: nobility in
character is beauty. By approaching the definition of a person in more than just the
physical elements, the Yorùbá have attempted to transcend superficiality.

And yet, in spite of this approach, great value has been placed - in Yorùbá religious,
social, and political worldview - on the dimension of physical beauty as the front-
facing carrier of much. Couched in the linguistic repertoire of the language are the
many ways in which physical attributes are celebrated in their diversity. A person
with sufficient flesh on their bones isn’t “fat”, he/she is ò. pé. lé. ngé. , which would
normally translate to “slender as a reed” but which is used, ironically, as a playful
understanding of their distinctive corpulence. A tall person is agùntás.o. ó. loò, one
long and graceful enough to use up appropriate yardage of clothing. The short one is
akúrúye. jó, one short and nimble enough to grace the dance floor. The light-skinned
Yorùbá child is apó. nbépóre., one ripe like the colour of palm oil; while the dark-
skinned one is adúmáradán - one delightfully black with a glossy skin. There are
many more.

In all of these instances, the Yorùbá have approached the diversity looks and
appearance of people with humour, grace, and a linguistic dexterity that wins friends.
With poetry and euphemisms carefully deployed as tools of documentation, the
memory of a culture survives in a most generous of words.

E. wà

(noun)
beauty, grace, a concept deeper than just what the senses perceive, but deferential to
what the senses perceive.

Lé. wà

(adjective)
being in possesssion of that which is noble, graceful, and aesthetically pleasing, in
more ways than one.

Yorùbá

(noun)
a group of people, a language, and a religion, originating in South-Western Nigeria,
West Africa. The language is spoken by around 30 million people in Nigeria, Benin,
Togo, and in Latin America (particularly in Brazil and Cuba). Anthropological research
put the origin of the language at about 4th Century BC. One of the peculiarities of the
language is tone, represented in writing by the grave and acute accents on vowels.

Kó. lá Túbò. sún is a writer, linguist, and the founder of YorubaName.com.

Foreword
by Khary Septh

Every single TEN of my closest are black; a solid nine of ’em said ‘don’t write for
no white boy’; though none of them publish a magazine about black gay culture. I
decided fuck it, just follow your heart, because you don’t publish a magazine about
black gay culture in pursuit of rainbows; you do it so once your heart realizes it can’t
trust five-star dining or twice-baked consciousness, it can no longer be fooled by
canned ideologies swirling about pots of gold.

This heart led me to Luke Austin. For as far as I could tell on Instagram, he had
steely-grey eyes and wild blonde hair; a white-boyish quality possessed in things
like fighter jets and high-school jack-off sessions. When not the boy Luke himself, in
his place, the most beautiful pictures of others. Around the world in 80 days and not
a fox of any color left unshot.

But it was Luke that I wanted. To touch him. To know him. To smell the freedom of
life—on a sail.

Black boys, I know, smell like shea butter and gently trampled soil; our journeys like
the sweat of black bodies trapped underneath things until they start to rot from the
inner mind out. They smell like my father who I suspect never loved me, like every
brother-lover on this journey whose soul is now one with mine, and imitations, like
that of runny semen on the backs of boys like Luke after the unexpected ejaculate of
anger and horror towards them leaves us both stiff, lit, lying and airless.

I finally met Luke in NewYork City, but regret never having leaned in to smell him. On
these pages, I can. Smell the cultural differences that prove how extraordinarily crude

and uncontextualized blacks’ interactions with whites truly are; the ridiculously
idealistic efforts of a boy bordering on the naive who just wants to solve the riddle
of why the disparity in ‘likes’ of his images of black and white men exists, and how
it works.

I smell a sweet success I could never know, I see a mark I could never make, I feel
a hit he could never take, and on these pages—where an understanding of beauty is
the only thing required and cultural differences aside—I’m happy to spare him. And
I’ll assure you: Luke isn’t as bad a white boy as he could be, and I find this deeply
inspiring; it makes me believe in the power of strides.

And even if that’s a lie, who cares? You don’t follow criticism when you’re publishing
a magazine about black gay culture, you follow the heart that can’t be fooled, and
the scent of unlikely friendships like the one I share with Luke Austin, because in
LÉ. WÀ—a beautifully photographed, well-intentioned ode to the black male—his
pictures smell just like mine; they’re in search of answers to the unanswerable just
like mine, and this makes us one on the page in a way that we could never be in real
life. Here, in a world of no dimension or substance, the work is beautiful enough to
dissolve differences and find pleasure. And by heart, I know this is enough.

Khary Septh is the founder of The Tenth Magazine.

Preface by Luke Austin

I may be a white guy from the suburbs of Sydney and new to America, but I’ve noticed
something that just doesn’t sit right with me. I have been capturing male youth and
beauty for almost 10 years now, and the stark contrast in Instagram ‘likes’ when I
upload a portrait of a Black man compared to a White one leaves me scratching my
head every time. The difference in love and attention each received was astounding.
Perhaps social media ‘likes’ don’t really mean anything. But in this case, I think it
reveals something about how Black men are seen, or unseen, in our society.

To my audience I ask, “Do you not see the beauty here?” “Why do you skip past these
images?” “Do these men even matter to you?” What does it mean for ME to use my
privilege, my social media ‘fame’ and my voice to call out other white people on their
shit. What does it mean to be an ally?

I photograph men who don’t look like me. Racism has made European standards
of beauty the norm. But I want my work to amplify the beauty of the world we live
in and counter this racist standard. Black skin is beautiful. Unfortunately, Black
skin because of history, harmful stereotypes, and the media - isn’t always seen or
regarded as such. LÉ. WÀ isn’t a political statement as much as it’s a response to a
blatant omission in the mainstream male portraiture landscape. I think any imagery
that distances Black men from the all too common notions and stereotypes, is
incredibly important.

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that
they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only
story”

-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I knew I had a collection of portraits that differed greatly to how I was used to seeing
Black men portrayed in photography books. Black men are too often photographed
as objects. Images that contribute to Black men being fetishized over that focus on
big muscles and private parts. I hope my portraits reveal the tender, sensitive,
and vulnerable sides of these men. From skinny, wiry bodies to gym worked
muscles, along with the recurring pink and florals, may these portraits inspire the
world to reconsider common misconceptions of Black masculinity, sexuality, and
stereotypes.

LÉ. WÀ contains three years’ worth of my favorite portraits of Black men. And I think
every one of them is beautiful, AND matters. To the world, and to my friends who
are captured in this collection, may you SEE, and may you FEEL, on these pages and
in your own eyes, the BEAUTY.










































































Click to View FlipBook Version