There’s never a tidy way to encapsulate the most beloved photo series published on Dazed across a whole year, and 2025 is no exception. From the “tragedy and humour, beauty and absurdity” of Juergen Teller’s era-defining images to the sprawling and stirring photographs from Nan Goldin’s treasured slideshows, these ten photo series reach across the unwieldy breadth of human experience.

They also traverse vast geographies and eras. Michella Bredahl’s Everything 001 brought together her contemporary portraits of pole dancers in their Paris homes. At the same time, Peter Hujar’s indelible photographs immortalise the iconic counterculture of New York City in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Taking her inspiration from Hujar’s work, Steph Wilson’s Gilded Lilies presents sensual, mysterious black-and-white portraits of her artist friends, all conceived and shot during a feverish two-week period this year. Feng Li’s White Nights in Wonderland, on the other hand, encompasses two decades of work by the Chinese photographer – a master opportunist whose pictures are the result of his ingenious eye for spontaneous oddities on the streets of Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai and his hometown, Chengdu. 

When you spend time with photographs shot by visionary artists, stories, ideas and new information emerge, it’s irrepressible. So I invite you to revisit these ten extraordinary bodies of work and draw what you will from this blizzard of desire, loss, friendship, absurdity, beauty, grief, love, at al.

PETER HUJAR, EYES OPEN IN THE DARK

Perhaps one of the most celebrated exhibitions in London this year, Raven Row‘s retrospective of Peter Hujar presented his most timeless, captivating work from his too-brief career. From the denizens of the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s to lovers, friends, animals, Peter Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling on her deathbed and the city’s crumbling piers; sex, love and death captured with Hujar’s indelible eye and reproduced in their black and white silver gelatin print glory. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

MICHELLA BREDAHL AND LOTTA VOLKOVA, EVERYTH!NG 001 (2025)

Shooting rapidly during just two days in Paris, Michella Bredahl worked with stylist Lotta Volkova to create Everyth!ng 001 – a collection of portraits of pole dancers in their homes. Taking pole dancing out of the context of a dance class or strip club and into the domestic, private space reconfigures our expectations of this art form. Bredahl’s dancers are introspective; they’re being photographed but they’re not performing. They cut elegant figures against the backdrop of their chaotic homes. Styled by Volkova in a mix of their own clothes and Miu Miu’s AW24 collection, they sit contemplative in the splits across their sofa, hold themselves aloft or suspend themselves upside down on the pole. “It’s a powerful medium for self-expression, strength, and grace,” Bredahl told Dazed. “To see someone so in control and in motion, it’s very beautiful and strong. I like photographing women as well. These women managed to make it look so effortless and graceful.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

MAYA SPANGLER, STOLEN BESOS

Caught in the hinterland between adolescence and adulthood, Maya Spangler’s debut photo book, Stolen Besos, occupies that strange time of change in our lives – the hour between the dog and the wolf, as it were. Shot in LA, NY, Miami, Austin, Phoenix, Warsaw, London and Paris, Spangler told Dazed, “at its core, a self-portrait told in pieces”. Each image reflects an aspect of the photographer‘s own psyche or aspirations. “The girls are versions of the girl I wanted to be: light, free, untouchable. But there’s always something lingering in their eyes. I think that tension between softness, sorrow and chaos is where I was living while making these images.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

FENG LI, WHITE NIGHTS IN WONDERLAND

Feng Li’s “everyday surrealism” conjures the world anew, shining his penetrating flash on the curious oddities and coincidences we might otherwise miss. His major 2025 exhibition, White Nights in Wonderland at Fotografiska, Berlin, brought together images taken over the last two decades by the self-taught fashion and street photographer. Shot out and about in Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai and his hometown, Chengdu, they invite us to appreciate the often bizarre, uncanny quality of reality. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

NAN GOLDIN,THIS WILL NOT END WELL

To place one image next to another sets a story in motion. In her work as a filmmaker, Nan Goldin places hundreds of photographs side by side and the result is a brilliant, incongruous mess of stories conveyed in potent fragments. Her major exhibition, This Will Not End Well, opened at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca earlier this year, presented the seminal slideshows in their entirety. From her magnum opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), to Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), dedicated to her sister and the trauma of families affected by suicide, and Fire Leap (2010–2022), a poignant homage to the unaffected, clear-sightedness of children, each body of work comprises hundreds of images, and each image adds to an accumulation and weight of meaning that makes Goldin’s slideshows so stirring. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

SOFIYA LORIASHVILI, STRIPPER EDITION

The changing rooms of any strip club are a sanctuary for dancers. Away from the club floor, the stage, the podiums and the gaze of customers, dancers retreat backstage to take a break from being observed. Behind the scenes, these private spaces are a different kind of territory for performers and the subject of Sofiya Loriashvili’s photo series, Stripper Edition. The changing rooms are where the illusion ceases. “The locker rooms are what stay with me the most,” she says of her own experience dancing in clubs. “They have a smell you can’t forget or find anywhere else. They look ‘glamorous’ at first glance, but they’re full of years and years of stories from hundreds of girls. I’ve found shoes covered in dust that must have been sitting there for years.”

STEPH WILSON, GILDED LILIES

Shot over one feverish fortnight during the spring heatwave this year, Steph Wilson’s photo project, Gilded Lilies, is first and foremost a study of people and their treasured objects. Inspired by Peter Hujar’s exhibition at Raven Row and the experience of seeing his prints up close, Wilson developed an intense desire to strip back her practice to the essentials for this intimate series. Her sitters – friends from the art world, including Harley Weir, Elsa Ruoy and Micheala Stark – are photographed with a kind of mystical intensity that Hujar approached his subjects.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

YORGOS LANTHIMOS, PHOTOGRAPHS

In 2024, the Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos published two photo books, Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken and i shall sing these songs beautifully. Each drew on the world of his filmmaking – the photographs were taken on set – while expanding and augmenting his cinematic universe. In 2025, his first photography exhibition at Los Angeles’ Webber Gallery presented a selection of his haunting, ambiguous and otherworldly stills. His photography offers both a counterpoint and a supplement to his films. “As a medium, it’s freer from conventions – film is very constrained by conventional narrative,” he told Dazed.“[Photography is] a beautiful thing that gives me some kind of calm, compared to the chaos of filmmaking.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

LIN ZHIPENG (AKA NO.223), AMOUR DÉFENDU

Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223)’s images always pulse with energy. Whether it be his sensual photographs of flowers or his casually erotic nudes, the Beijing-based photographer has an eye for spontaneous beauty. In his new photo book, Amour Défendu (Forbidden Love), he takes to the streets of Paris to capture friends and models (all cast from Instagram) in a series of inspired and captivating nudes.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

JUERGEN TELLER, YOU ARE INVITED

Juergen Teller’s major exhibition, you are invited, in Onassis Ready in Athens, is an invitation to perceive the world through the photographer’s idiosyncratic gaze. “Everyone else seems so serious, so contrived. I want to bring everything together, from the funny to the tragic, because that’s life,” he told Dazed. “I want to capture everything in my photographs: tragedy and humour, beauty and absurdity.” Undoubtedly one of the most influential image-makers of his generation, this vast show spans decades of work, taking in everything from his subversive luxury campaigns (including the iconic picture of Victoria Beckham crawling out of a shopping bag bearing her own name) to his celebrated 1990s portraits of Kate Moss in bed with her dyed pink hair fanned out across the pillow, to more intimate pictures of the rituals of his daily family life. This is Juergen Teller’s world. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.