From Marina Mónaco’s portraits of impulsive lovers across Europe to Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223)’s sensual, lust-filled photographs of flowers and flesh, and Masahisa Fukase’s lovelorn, obsessive pictures of his wife Yoko, here is just a small selection of romantic, erotic photo projects published on Dazed in recent years...

MARINA MÓNACO, KIDS

Spontaneity is a guiding principle of Marina Mónaco’s image-making. After leaving her hometown of Buenos Aires for Europe in 2020 – studying filmmaking in Stuttgart, then “randomly” living in Italy for six months before settling in Berlin – Mónaco has trained her lens on European youth culture. Shot on digital, analogue and VHS, her project Kids captures subcultures, friendships and, most frequently, lovers. “I love how they just trust me and open up,” she told Dazed back in 2022, “they show me their rooms, they show me who they are, their friends, maybe they kiss in front of me, and I capture that split-second moment.”

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ELSA ROUY AND LUCIA FARROW, SALT AND MUD

Taking its name from the title of Anne Carson’s poem ​​And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud, this exhibition, curated by Elsa Rouy and Lucia Farrow and photographed by Harley Weir, explores desire as tender and grotesque, erotic and innocent. The images feature the artists’ bodies adorned in their own hand-crafted ceramics and scaly latex pieces, posing in grimy bathtubs and mud-streaked bathroom mirrors, entwined with mud, salt, and yearning, shaping intimacy through vulnerability, excess, and devotion.

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MASAHISA FUKASE, FROM WINDOW

Turning the camera inward, Masahisa Fukase fused art and existence until devotion tipped into fixation, never shielding himself from loss or death. Nowhere is this clearer than From Window, his obsessive series of portraits of his wife Yoko, photographed daily as she left for work. Their marriage was already fracturing, yet Fukase clung to her image with ritual intensity, loving her through the lens. The photographs hover between playfulness and despair, intimacy and distance, revealing a love so consuming it ultimately became destructive – an attempt to hold onto someone already slipping away.

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MYRIAM BOULOS, SEXUAL FANTASIES

Amid social collapse, Myriam Boulos’ defiant photo series asks where erotic desire can survive. Her uncompromising portraits explore Lebanese women’s sexual fantasies as private realms of control and resistance, untouched by crisis. Against media images of Arab bodies defined by grief and violence, Boulos shows pleasure, intimacy, and desire. From fantasies of dominance to revolutionary scenes charged with sensuality, her work insists that desire persists even in ruin. These hidden inner worlds become political, challenging victimhood and patriarchy, and asserting sexuality as a vital, disruptive source of power.

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ROTIMI FANI-KAYODE, THE STUDIO – STAGING DESIRE

Looping on a battered television, Rage and Desire frames Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s urgent call, “We must imaginatively reimagine Blackness, maleness and sexuality.” In his Brixton studio, desire became both method and subject: a space to stage fantasies, negotiate identity, and make Black queer eroticism visible. Drawing on Yoruba cosmology and Western art history alike, his photographs linger on flesh, touch, and tension – muscles, embraces, leather, skin. Here, pleasure and pain blur, cultivating desire and transforming the studio into a sanctuary of erotic self-invention.

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SLAVA MOGUTIN, ANALOG HUMAN STUDIES

Spanning two decades, Slava Mogutin’s photo book Analog Human Studies embraces a pansexual, intergenerational vision of queerness, one rooted in trust, tenderness, and collaboration. Mogutin’s portraits resist uniformity, allowing each subject to define their own relationship to identity and desire. Shaped by personal loss, the project is a meditation on mortality, memory, and queer history.

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ANDY WARHOL, LOOKING AT ANDY LOOKING

Andy Warhol is the ultimate voyeur artist: obsessive and fetishistic, transfixed by beauty and celebrity. The portrait that often emerges from his diaries is of a frigid hypochondriac, chronically lonely and isolated, even as he moved as a star among the luminaries of late-20th century New York’s most effervescent cultural milieu. We often think of his work as somewhat impersonal and mechanical, removed and remote. He “wants to watch”, but he doesn’t necessarily want to touch.

Looking at Andy Looking: The Intimate Early Film Work of Andy Warhol (presented in 2024 at the Museum of Sex in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum) invites us to reconsider this caricature of Warhol. Focusing on the artist’s early films and footage, the show features his intimate, earthier, more sensual portraits and films.

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JONNAH BRON, WHERE WE DID IT

For four years, photographer Jonnah Bron documented the beds she had sex in. Where We Did It, a series of intimate bed portraits, shows the aftermath of desire. Treating the images as a visual diary, Bron captures the rumpled sheets and scattered clothes, exploring intimacy, memory, and the fear of forgetting or being forgotten. The vacated beds become shared yet private records of connection, resisting explicitness while inviting mystery and contemplating both presence and absence. 

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SENSORED 03

Conceived as “an art book disguised as a magazine”, Sensored prioritises visceral explorations of desire over detached concepts, insisting that erotic art should be felt, not intellectualised. Across photography and visual art, the publication creates a non-judgmental space for fantasies, fetishes, and identities that exist beyond the binary. By collapsing distinctions between erotica and porn, Sensored expands the erotic possibilities of print and resists the moral frameworks that still police pleasure.

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DEREK RIDGERS, HELLO, I LOVE YOU

Hello, I Love You distils Derek Ridgers’ decades-long documentation of British youth subcultures into a tender study of intimacy in public space. Shot across punk, post-punk and new romantic London, the photographs capture couples kissing on dance floors, tube platforms and pub banquettes, moments of private desire unfolding amid chaos. Originally published as zines, the book reveals Ridgers’ respectful voyeurism: observing rather than directing, asking permission, but never breaking the spell. Beyond nostalgia, the images reflect on how notions of subculture, privacy and mystery have shifted, preserving a fleeting era when nightlife offered anonymity, connection and romance.

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MATT LAMBERT, KEIM

Photographer Matt Lambert’s debut book, Keim, is an archive of intimate images shot in Berlin between 2011 and 2014. The book captures Lambert’s signature vision of intimacy – raw, anonymous, and unfiltered. Featuring young men caught mid-kiss, mid-ejaculation, or idling in bed, the images treat sex as casual, honest, and everyday. Shaped by Berlin’s creative freedom, Keim reframes desire beyond spectacle, suggesting that while digital culture changes how intimacy begins and ends, the moment itself remains timeless and human.

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LIN ZHIPENG (AKA NO.223) AT SAINT LAURENT, RIVE DROITE

Focusing on China’s youth counter-culture, Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223) turns his lens on friends and lovers, capturing private moments that feel spontaneous and unguarded. Exposed flesh, discarded underwear, splayed fruit and phallic flowers recur as sensual motifs, balancing humour with vulnerability. First shared through DIY zines and social media, his work resists conservative ideals by celebrating closeness, touch, and erotic curiosity. His photographs present desire not as spectacle, but as a lived, everyday experience, fleeting and intimate.

Read the full story here on Dazed.