Photography can offer a window into other people’s lives, and often change how we feel about our own lives in the process. Nowhere is this more true than in some of the global photo stories we’ve covered here at Dazed this year, featuring everyone from skaters in Palestine, to the indigenous communities of the Brazilian rainforest, to obsessive fashion collectors in Tokyo.

Some, like Lauren Luxenberg’s portraits of fearless skaters in Medellin, are shot by non-locals who witness the geography and culture with fresh eyes. Others are captured by longtime locals, or those – like British-Nigerian Ollie Tikare – who count their projects as a homecoming of sorts, reconnecting with family and heritage.

Below, we’ve gathered ten of the highlights from Dazed’s global photo stories in 2025.

GLEESON PAULINO, ECHOES OF THE AMAZON

Gleeson Paulino’s photos of the rainforest and its indigenous communities are, in his own words, “a reminder that we are not separate from nature, but a part of it; a call to remember, to respect, and to reconnect.” Building on his roots in the Brazilian Amazon, where he lived until he moved to London at 17, the images are surreal but grounded in a lived reality that’s more deserving of our attention than ever.

LAUREN LUXENBERG, TOUCHING GROUND

A chance meeting brought photographer Lauren Luxenberg together with the Colombian skater and creative director Ronal Sanmartin, also known as WTF Ronnie, a few years back. Touching Ground documents their time embedded in the city’s skate scene, where roots – whether that’s family, community, or nature – run deep, and a rich skateboarding culture offers a portal to “another world”.

OLLIE TIKARE, ÈKÓ

For British-Nigerian photographer Ollie Tikare, Lagos was a near-mythical space – a “distant yet palpable presence” – until his first trip in 2023. It was “almost like a pilgrimage” he says, as he reconnected with his heritage and family, but also realised the reductive view of the city as seen via Western media, AKA through the prism of neo-colonialism. His ongoing series Èkó is an attempt to push back against that view, capturing the city’s beauty from an ‘Afro-realist’ perspective.

SKATEPAL, HARAKA BARAKA

Skateboarding and Arabic language are the twin subjects of Haraka Baraka, the 2025 book by SkatePal, a skating-based non-profit that dates back to 2006. Created in collaboration with designer Samar Maakaroun and illustrator Hin Ching Chung, it features photographs, original typography, and interviews with the SkatePal community who were invited to reflect on their favourite phrases. “In skateboarding, you can do a trick in different styles,” says SkatePal co-founder Charlie Davis. “When you write in Arabic, you can write words in different ways. There’s a parallel.”

ISABELLE ZHAO, MONGKOL

When you picture combat sports, you probably don’t picture the kind of tender, fraternal images in Isabelle Zhao’s Mongkol. Documenting the attendees of Rawai, a family-run Muay Thai gym in Thailand, they focus less on the violence and more on the moments in between. Young men stand with their arms interlinked, or sit atop each other’s shoulders. “In some of the photos I took of the boys’ training,” the photographer says, “it’s indistinguishable whether they’re embracing or fighting.”

GILI BENITA, SHINMITSU

Gili Benita’s Shinmitsu captures the meeting point between the public self and private feelings: the vulnerability between friends and lovers. In a series of tender portraits spanning bedrooms, parks, and shared apartments, this intimate feeling exists as a “soft, unconscious act of resistance” to social norms. The photos themselves tap into the emotional histories of both the people and places they represent.

JITENDRA JERRY, WHO AM I?!

“Around the world, there’s a growing urgency to challenge fixed ideas of gender and recognise that queerness and transness are not trends or disruptions, but deeply lived realities,” the photographer Jitendra Jerry told Dazed earlier this year. These identities have existed in India throughout history, they point out, but have been all but erased by “colonial, casteist, and patriarchal systems”. The photos in Who Am I?! Represent a vital step toward reclaiming the narrative, via 150 portraits of queer young people spanning cities including Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

KYOICHI TSUZUKI, HAPPY VICTIMS

A “happy victim” has trimmed down the three main necessities of their life (food, shelter clothing) down to just one. If you hadn’t already guessed, it’s the latter. From 1999 to 2006, Tsuzuki photographed some of Tokyo’s most fanatical fashion collectors in their own homes, as collected in this 2025 reissue from Apartamento. Mostly, they’re the kind of people you’d never see on the catwalk or in brands’ marketing materials. “Ultimately, I wasn’t that interested in fashion design,” he says. “I was more interested in the people who make the high fashion business run. Without them, no high-fashion business could survive, yet they are never recognised or welcomed.”

FELIPE ROMERO BELTRÁN, BRAVO

The Mexico-US borderlands are a loaded space, heavy with hope and aguish, as explored by Colombian photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán. His arresting portrait series began in 2020, capturing friends and friends of friends living on the Mexican side of the border, and offers an emotional, humanising counterpoint to the heightened rhetoric, militarisation, and asylum policy of the last few years in the United States.

REBECCA THOMAS, TAMAKI MAKAURAU RISING

From a distance, New Zealand may seem like a form of utopia, but the reality is much more complex. The country’s mainstream can be conformist by nature, suggests photographer Rebecca Thomas. By contrast, she captures the people of New Zealand’s Indigenous and anti-capitalist creative scene. “I think it’s important to profile people of all backgrounds,” she says, “who are offering alternative ways of living and not just conforming to the narrative of ‘get married, buy a house (if you can), have two kids’ and stay too busy to make any meaningful changes to society.”