Toyin Ibidapo: Boys Boys Boys

The fleeting beauty of youth is captured in these portraits of androgynous boys from British-born Nigerian photographer Toyin Ibidapo. A paean to the peach-fuzz haze and charged emotions of adolescence, Ibidapo’s first solo show There's No Such Thing as Perfect (But There's Perfection in the Things We Love) opens tonight at Doors Showcase gallery in London. “It's like hearing really beautiful music for the very first time,” Ibidapo says of finding her stripling muses. “It's that same sensation. You want to take that boy's picture again and again, because you haven't finished.” The exhibition blossomed from Ibidapo’s book Cult of Boys, a personal project in which the photographer found 100 beautiful young males and captured them draped across sofas, the backseats of cars or perched in sun-soaked windowsills with bare bird chests and jeans. “No two boys are the same and they're all the same. There was one boy I was completely devastated by. He was really a tortured soul,” says Ibidapo, who has collaborated with Alexander McQueen, super-stylist Nicola Formichetti and designer Kim Jones, as well as contributing to Dazed & Confused, Arena Homme Plus and SHOWstudio. “Some people would run away from that but I find it more beautiful… because you can't fake it.”