The son of a travel writer, Wigan was accustomed to travelling foreign lands from a young age. He began to document what he saw with a Polaroid camera, drawn into the American suburban scenes he discovered travelling with his father.
Having studied History of Art and Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh, he worked in film production and advertising before he began assisting photographers and ultimately making the switch.
His classically tinged education gave him the inspiration for the title of the series, imbuing his subjects with a mythological status. “It’s almost like a life of leisure most of the time, with this great emphasis on looking good and being physically trim and fit and showing off,” he says of gang culture.
“I was looking for some kind of equivalent lifestyle — and I thought, in some ways, they live like the Gods on Mount Olympus in a way. Time is divided between looking good, relaxing, love affairs [with] the occasional spats of warfare, so it really reminded me of those old myths and legends. God is also a slang term they use to describe a veteran hustler or someone who’s survived the prison system and the streets and is still going.”
Wigan is currently working on a project in the Caribbean, and has just finished a project centred around tribal culture in African countries. While linked to his current practice, he is finding different cultures bringing new context to his work. “I’m trying to focus on the parties and night time dances [in Africa], but its a very fragile scene and it’s shrinking fast as their land gets encroached on by more and more highways. So its a very different story: less glamorous, more sombre.”
Find more of Ivar’s work here.
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