Phyllis Galembo, the award-winning photographer, professor at the State University of New York and the collector of Helloween costumes, has been capturing the exotic patterns of Nigeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Zambia and Jamaica for over twenty years. Her subject is mostly the masquerade in religious rituals and local festivals, carnivale costumes, art and nature, the transformation of men, the visual culture in West Africa, and also Helloween. She doesn’t just documents those rituals and people wearing masks but turns them into real/fictional characters from pagan myths, anthrophology books and dark bedtime stories. Her bizarre portraits have been exhibited in New York, Ohio, Kansas City, Washington DC and Amsterdam since 1993.
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Tese costumes look like the ones from the Mighty Boosh