Facehunter captures style of WA
One of the world's most in-vogue fashion photographers, Swiss blogger Yvan Rodic, was in WA last week in search of style.
Rodic was working as a copywriter in Paris eight years ago when he started taking photos of people at art galleries and posting them online.
Now, hundreds of thousands of followers and several published books later, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of street-style blogging.
Also known as FaceHunter, Rodic, 36, travels to fashion capitals and lesser-known locations around the world, documenting local interpretations of style.
In Australia to help a spectacle maker with its new range of frames, he gave his impressions of Perth, Fremantle and Broome.
"Perth had this very corporate, banking image to me," he said. "It was my first time in Fremantle and I enjoyed the more laidback and bohemian vibe. I think it was more creative and alternative.
"Broome was literally like being in a different culture. It felt like I wasn't even in Australia. The climate, the colours and the orange dust - it was really exotic."
Curtin University's cultural studies professor Jon Stratton said he understood Rodic's perspective of Broome.
"WA is so set up in terms of cities specialising in particular things," he said.
"Perth's the middle-class business centre, Kalgoorlie-Boulder is the working class mining town and Broome is the holiday spot."
Professor Stratton said he found Rodic's work fascinating and likened it to the now defunct British magazine The Face.
He said it showed the impacts of globalisation on style.
"What The Face was doing in terms of photography and style became much easier to do on the internet," he said.
"What Mr Rodic is doing has picked up from that but very much in terms of globalisation.
"You get this relationship between the global and the local, where people will take what they want from mass culture and multinational companies, and reuse it on their own terms."
Professor Stratton said Rodic's photos tended to feature younger people who embraced an "alternative" sense of style.
It was surprising then that Rodic's favourite image from WA was of an elderly indigenous man called Bonnie.
"His face really tells a story and there's something so serious and beautiful about him," Rodic said. "In one second, you could tell this man has been through a lot of his life."
Despite capturing thousands of examples of street style over the years, Rodic said there was no set formula for catching his eye.
