Beacon Gallery is delighted to feature two of Paul Shiakallis’s photographs from ‘Leathered Skins, Unchained Hearts’ in our current Photographing The Female exhibit.
To learn more about this series, check out the following article which goes into great detail about how Shiakallis first got introduced to this subculture.
It started at a rock concert in Botswana in 2010: South African photographer Paul Shiakallis noticed a group of black men wearing Mad Max-esque cowboy outfits. Heavy metal T-shirts, studded leather jackets and pants, boots with spurs, and cowboy hats. “I thought they were just dressing up for the hell of it,” Paul recalls. But, at a concert a few years later, he encountered them again—and this time, there were women. “I was instantly attracted to them,” he says. “They were menacing, raucous and very unladylike.” By now, the media had already latched onto the country’s metalheads, known as the “Marok” in the Tswana language, broadcasting bizarre images of African men dressed in post-apocalyptic Hells Angels attire. But, Paul wondered, where were the captivating women he had seen?
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