This month’s photo stories on Dazed traverse all sorts of seemingly disparate subjects and eras. Both Bobby Busnach and Nan Goldin offer a glimpse of queer life in 20th-century New York, while Vincent Wechselberger allows us a contemporary insight into the more introspective, solitary moments of queer sex work. Talking of quiet moments, Nick Offord’s portraits depict the unseen sedentary periods of waiting that models endure during fashion week, and the friendships that flourish in these shared passages of liminal time. Michella Bredahl’s photography practice is also about friendship – with a focus on the intense friendships that exist between women. More than this, her pictures are also about kinship.

While all the photo projects below are very different in their subjects, aesthetics, and approaches, they are united by a sense of compassion and an appreciation of liminality – not just lives lived on the margins, but the magic that can occur during those in-between moments. 

NAN GOLDIN, THIS WILL NOT END WELL

Nan Goldin’s life and work are guided by profound courage and love. And that’s rarely felt more evident and tangible than while watching her slideshows. Each photograph adds to the accumulation of meaning; each song, immaculately chosen, amplifies the weight of feeling.

This Will Not End Well, the first major Nan Goldin exhibition to focus on her filmmaking, opened at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca this month. This iteration of the blockbuster exhibition includes two works screened in a museum context for the first time in Europe, and an immersive sound installation commissioned for the show, as well as some of her most beloved works such as The Other Side (1992-2021) and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022).

Read the full story here on Dazed.

This Will Not End Well is running at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, until 15 February 2025.

MICHELLA BREDAHL, ROOMS WE MADE SAFE

Michella Bredahl’s work is beloved for its compassionate, loving portrayal of women’s lives. The relationship between a mother and daughter is particularly rich and knotty – at once enriching, painful, fraught, messy, and sacred. In her latest exhibition, Rooms We Made Safe, Bredahl displays her mother’s photography alongside her own, fostering a dialogue between the two bodies of work and their dual perspectives not only on their shared family life, but womanhood itself. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

Rooms We Made Safe is at Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam until 8 February 2026. In 2026, the exhibition will travel to Kunstmuseum Brandts and the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark. The book, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther and Franz König, is out now.

NICK OFFORD, NO SHOWS

Behind the glamour and spectacle of every fashion week, when it comes to life as a model, there’s a fuck load of waiting around, economy travel and low-budget hotel rooms. Shot over a decade while signed to Tomorrow Is Another Day, the agency celebrated for placing androgynous male beauty on the catwalk, Nick Offord’s No Shows beautifully documents the liminal moments of men’s fashion weeks and the intense friendships born in these interminable in-between periods. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

Nick Offord’s No Shows is published by Road Map and is available now.

TYLER MITCHELL, WISH THIS WAS REAL

Precarity, resiliance, tenderness, optimism and poignancy... the work of Tyler Mitchell is so abundant in beautiful qualities. Wish This Was Real at the MEP in Paris unites work made by the Mitchell over the past decade. Reflecting on the show’s title, he told Dazed, “The phrase began to encapsulate many of the tensions at play in my practice. It also speaks to a kind of yearning that runs through the work: a desire for a tender vision of Black life.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

Tyler Mitchell’s Wish This Was Real is running at the MEP in Paris until 25 January 2026.

VINCENT WECHSELBERGER, READY

Vincent Wechselberger’s photo book Ready is an insider’s portrait of queer sex work. Moving between intimate portraits of his fellow sex workers, still lives of essentials like condoms, hair bands, and deodorant, and shots of beds in vacant rooms and love hotels. Wechselberger’s portraits are still and soulful; they’re about the introspective moments before work begins. The book’s foreword poses the question, “Shower, hair, makeup, music, prayer – as sex workers, how do we prepare for the charged moment of sexual encounter?” 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

Ready is available here now. 

IVAN VOLODKO, 横丁 (YOKOCHŌ)

Shot on his iPhone, Ivan Volodko’s grainy, high-contrast photographs of Tokyo offer a cinematic, film-noiresque vision of city life in Japan. Reminiscent of Daido Moriyama’s moody, dramatic and sometimes abstracted images, Volodko’s study of Tokyo offers us a stylised vision of frenetically paced street life as well as tranquil moments of solitude. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

STEPH WILSON, GILDED LILIES

Inspired by the gravitas of Peter Hujar’s photographs, Steph Wilson set out to take a series of portraits with the same integrity of meaning and intention. Over a two-week heatwave this spring, she shot this entire series of photographs of her friends Harley Weir, Elsa Ruoy and Micheala Stark – and their most treasured pieces of jewellery. “Since I was a kid, I’ve been entranced by unusual objects that seemed to pulse with narrative, mysticism or beauty,” she told Dazed. “My relationship to objects is one of love; they become vital sources of energy to create.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

Guen Fiore described the atmosphere of her portraits, “What was once loud softens, but it never disappears.” Her debut photobook, Echo, traces the stories of girls’ adolescence, following their journeys across seven seminal years. “Each portrait captures the essence of the girls at a particular moment: a snapshot of their identities and experiences as we were. The echo is what remains for us to feel and reflect on now,” she explained in a recent interview.

“The transitional stage between adolescence and young adulthood is filled with change,” she reflected. “External pressures can make it difficult to accept yourself and freely explore what you’re naturally drawn to,” she continues. “At its core, my work became an exploration of the body, followed by an exploration of sexuality.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

MAXIMILIAN KILWORTH, A SUMMER BUILT ON SOFTNESS

A Summer Built on Softness is a painfully tender recollection of the first year of a relationship – the growing intimacy, the burgeoning of first love. On what was only the second date with his soon-to-be boyfriend, Nathan, photographer Maximilian Kilworth brought his camera. So did Nathan. That syncopated gesture was to set the rhythm for a flourishing romance. 

“Everyone thinks first love happens when you’re a teenager,” Kilworth told Dazed. “But for me, and for so many other queer people, that’s just not the case. We don’t really have the privilege of dissecting those romantic aspects of our lives when we’re young. We’re just trying to survive.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

BOBBY BUSNACH, ALL OF US STARS

Bobby Busnach’s 1970s portraits of New York City’s hustlers, runaways, trans women and club kids offer a hyper-glamorous fantasy at odds with the reality of life lived on the margins. Shot with the help of Geraldine ‘Gerry’ Visco, Busnach’s best friend, muse, co-creator and patron, All of Us Stars brings together photographs taken at the pair’s elegantly dishevelled apartment in the Upper West Side. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

All of Us Stars is published by Reference Point and is available to order here.