‘the pictures are seriously raw, stunning, even kamikaze’ – Boy George

As midnight falls and central London’s streets begin to empty, a loose-knit community of fabulously attired drag kings and queens, fetishists, burlesque performers and transgender people bursts into bloom. These startlingly exotic, self-styled Night Flowers are walking works of art, the streets their stage and every moment a performance.

Photographer Damien Frost spent a year wandering London’s streets in search of its most colourful inhabitants. The astounding portraits taken by Frost, feature in the solo exhibition Night Flowers at The Lock-Up from 5 February – 13 March 2016.

Launching in conjunction with the exhibition, the book Night Flowers, published by Merrell Publishers and with a foreword by Boy George, is an extraordinarily powerful record of the ultimate alternative street style.

Although traditional in style, most of Frost’s photographs from the series were taken as incidental portraits following chance encounters outside clubs or in neon-lit alleys. The remarkably still quality of the images belies the fact that they were taken on London’s streets with curious, and sometimes hostile, revelers passing by. His method of capturing these images is recorded in a mini-documentary commissioned as part of the exhibition.

Frost’s background in theatre gives him a deep
 appreciation of the unrestrained creativity and vivid 
imagination of the Night Flowers. His arresting 
images capture the transformative effects of their 
intricate and painstakingly (not to say painfully)
 applied make-up and costumes, and their unapologetic self-expression.

ABOUT DAMIEN FROST

Damien Frost is an Australian artist, photographer and graphic designer, who now lives in London where he makes posters for ballet and opera houses.

Though self-described as reserved and conservatively dressed, Damien, every night after work obsessively searches the city—sometimes for hours—until he has a ‘random encounter’ that produces a portrait of a stranger’s creative style.