While the end of September may signal the death of summer, all is not lost! To provide some consolation, Dazed has rounded up the best photo stories of the past month to give you a dose of much-needed escapism. 

September’s photo stories include Sophy Rickett’s Pissing Women, a seminal series depicting women defiantly urinating on the streets of London’s financial district. Elsewhere, the idea of the home as a private sanctuary is subverted in Adam Murray’s The Domestic Stage, a collection of 22 photographers’ takes on the nature of privacy, re-examined in the age of visual curation, including the likes of Clifford Prince King, Carrie Mae Weems, Rachel Fleminger Hudson, Jesse Glazzard, Tina Barney and Corinne Day.

Further escapism is available via Arvida Byström’s PET, which utilises the aesthetics of AI porn to ask what it really means to have intimacy between humans and machines. The worlds of underground tattoo artists, the dreams of Parisian adolescents, and the perspectives of queer creatives are dipped into through a collection of nine must-see zines.

Whichever world you choose to escape into, Dazed’s Art and Photography section can willingly provide the means with these seven most-loved photo stories of September. 

ALEXIS KLESHIK, GRAND ST STRIPPERS 

Positioned against the backdrop of New York’s strip club scene, Alexis Kleshik’s Grand St Strippers portrays the dancers of a Brooklyn club from the perspective of one of their own. Starting work as a stripper following a move to New York, Kleshik used her time away from the club floor to shoot her fellow dancers, disrupting and subverting heterosexist stereotypes that position sex workers and strippers as a “hypersexualised fantasy”. Melding staged shots from the inside of the club with stylised portraits of the dancers outside, the series deftly weaves together a conversation between the dancers’ interior and exterior identities. The outcome of this conversation is a visual paean on self-possession, body autonomy and creativity. Complex narratives are explored here, but crucially they’re explored on the dancers’ own terms, resulting in “images that reflected both reality and imagination, holding space for the dancers’ own visions of themselves while reflecting the complex realities of this profession”.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

PRISSILYA JUNEWIN, EVERYDAY COMMUTE 

Commuters reading a book, running to the next transport link, combing through their hair as the sun rises (or sets) behind them; these are the moments of quiet, ritualised drifting captured by Prissilya Junewin in her series Everyday Commute. Following her visits to Tokyo, Junewin became fascinated with the liminality of the bustling city’s commuting hours, deciding to document the brief periods of stillness that exist within the rhythmic commotion of the city. Accompanying the journeys of five of Tokyo’s inhabitants as they travelled to and from work, Junewin explains that “it was so important to me to actually capture them on their real, everyday routes”. The series, as a result, depicts the real-life yearning of a generation of workers as they try to find balance between hectic city life and moments of slower personal freedom. Interspersed with photos of Tokyo’s natural landscapes, the series is an exercise in daydreaming.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

SOPHY RICKETT, PISSING WOMEN

Conceived and shot while she was working at the Financial Times in 1995, Sophy Rickett’s Pissing Women explores a time when women’s roles within the workplace were still bound by the shadowy remnants of “post-Thatcher gender norms”. Now, 30 years on, a reprint of the radical series, which depicts women dressed in full corporate garb pissing on the streets of London’s financial district, has been released. On the physical act of pissing, and the gendered tension it provokes, the photographer notes that “men seem so carefree; they do it in the open while we have to perform it in private”. Capturing two seemingly diametric modes of physicality, that of a triumphant, standing piss performed in the constrictive feminine corporate uniform of a pencil skirt and heels, Rickett’s subjects challenge the restrictive binaries of gendered corporate culture by “co-opting a behaviour that was, and still is, so strongly coded as male”. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

ADAM MURRAY, THE DOMESTIC STAGE 

Adam Murray’s The Domestic Stage revisits over thirty years of fashion images set within a domestic environment. Originally conceived as a book based on fashion photographers of the 1990s, the curator and researcher’s project took on a new form once Covid hit, explainging to Dazed how “domestic space took on a whole new role in our lives, consequently informing new work that was being made”. The book is a compilation of the work of 22 image makers, with shots ranging from an intimate kitchen dance between lovers by Clifford Prince King to an eerily mannequin-esque portrait of the Hilton women by Sarah Jones. The disruption of the notion of the home as a private space is at the forefront of this series, which proves to be more relevant than ever as we enter what Murray describes as the age of “post-privacy”, one dominated by reality TV, social media and an uncanny fascination with the private lives of others. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

GARETH MCCONNELL, WINDOW

Taken from the second-story window of his London home between 2011 and 2022, Gareth McConnell’s Window captures and exalts the minutiae of life on a London street. Cropped, enlarged and saturated to draw attention to moments that would otherwise be lost against the backdrop of urban sprawl, McConnell presents his unwitting subjects in the throes of a fight, wrapped in an embrace, walking, cycling and riding the bus towards destinations unknown. As arts writer Ellen Mara De Wachter describes, a “fleeting moment turns into an intrigue”: the air of surveillance makes us curious about the strangers who walk the streets next to us. Who are they? Where are they going? What moment led up to this point? Window provokes these questions and ultimately reminds us that “infinite mystery is all around us”.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

ARVIDA BYSTRÖM - PET (PROJECTED EMOTIONAL TECHNOLOGIES) 

Arvida Byström’s PET explores the ever-growing relationship between humans and technology, specifically AI companions. Inspired in part by popular content on AI porn websites, as well as the skewed dynamics between human beings and their animal friends, Byström’s series presents her subjects as hyperrealistic (yet AI-smoothed) avatars that exist as hybrids of animals and bikini-clad hot girls. Investigating how we exercise desire in a world that increasingly substitutes intimacy with technology, Byström explains: “Humans have started emulating how computers play chess, because they play chess better than humans...  people that watch a lot of porn start picking up little habits from porn, that people do because of camera angles and stuff like that... There’s a push and pull between our technologies and us, and we’re shaped by that.” PET explores the “very human” notion of seeking emotional comfort outside of humanity, and the way in which technology has become a part of the fabric of our desire. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

ZINES

The nine zines in this round-up have a common thread. Offering an alternative to big publications and the dispassionate visual bombardment of the algorithm, the countercultural material world of zines offers a more intimate dialogue between creator and consumer, as well as access to worlds that exist outside of the mainstream. In Ben Trogdon’s Tattoo Punk, the increasingly conventional world of tattoo parlours are challenged through hand-torn collages, sketches and the DIY representations of underground tattoo artists. Non-linear notions of the past and future are explored in Yuka Hirac’s jajaja…瞑想散歩, with the Tokyo-based artist using uncanny, pop imagery and an orange-haired persona to present her readers with a world that is steeped in both nostalgia and post-modernism. Also on the list is Polly Pearn-Lewis and Izzy Woodmansey’s Dyke 4 Dyke, which brings together essays, art and poems from lesbian contributors, providing a tangible space for underrepresented voices to connect away from the “fear-inducing headlines” depicted in mainstream media. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.