Preview: Ivar Wigan “The God” ~ Opens May 21 at Little Big Man Gallery

Scottish Photographer, Ivar Wigan, presents a series of images taken around the street culture associated with the urban music scene of the American South. Captured on the urban fringes of multiple cities—predominately from Miami, Atlanta and New Orleans—the images are a defiant celebration of a marginalized and often demonized culture, here raised to iconographic status and suffused with a sense of admiration and empathy.

To understand Wigan’s triumphal urges, it is perhaps helpful to consider the chosen title for the series. In slang taken from the community he documents, a ‘God’ is a veteran hustler—someone who has either survived the ‘streets’ and/or the complex maze of America’s prison system. This lionization of what might be considered a transgressive community is a central theme of Wigan’s work. “I saw parallels between people outside the law and the classical allusion,” says Wigan. Where some might perceive danger and the unseemly, Wigan proposes a heroic pantheon. “Within the community, there is a huge amount of time spent on refining the image—there are classical ideas of beauty present in the way people present themselves.”

The uniqueness of "The Gods" has won acclaim and recognition from the British Journal of Photography, Feature Shoot Magazine, i-D Magazine, Hunger Magazineand VICE for documenting a culture that is often misunderstood.