In the aftermath of the recent UK heatwave, here are eight of the most febrile, fevered photo stories from the past month on Dazed. These highlights include Marc Baptiste and Angel Oduko’s ode to the style and glamour of Old Nollywood, and Ryan O'Toole Collett’s investigation into youth culture and identity in Mexico City. We also looked back on Nancy Honey's career exploring the breadth of experiences of being a woman, and spoke to Chus&Greg’s about their latest photo project, which focuses on that fleeting transition between adolescence and adulthood.

Elsewhere, Kristina Rozhkova’s new photo book is a beautiful but horror-tinged fever dream, while IDEA Books’ republication of cult dyke zine, KUTT, is a dream come true for the magazine’s ever-growing number of fans. Petra Collins’ Star explores the dark underbelly of pop stardom, while Chad Moore’s latest photo book, Eyes and Skies, is a more life-affirming collection of images marvelling at the mysteries of the universe and the fathoms-deep eyes of loved ones. 

CHUS & GREG, FAST!

Photography duo Chus&Greg have frequently turned their lens to the ever-evolving landscape of youth culture to document nuanced aspects of this fraught passage. From Brighton’s burgeoning goth scene to teenagers navigating lockdown during the Covid epidemic, their work makes a space for young people to express themselves and explicate experiences which, often in their hyperspecificity, allow for overarching insights into the conditions of growing up. This latest book, Fast!, spans portraits taken in London, Paris, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Madrid and Tokyo, documenting that brief stage of life as adolescence transitions into adult life, which the pair describe as “that moment right after teenagehood – when things are shifting, but nothing is fully defined yet”.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

KRISTINA ROZHKOVA, UNBEWITCHED

Having spent two years under criminal prosecution due to her artistic practice, Russian artist Kristina Rozhkova’s latest photobook traces these terrifying years and what followed after she left. “I was in a state of constant terror,” she told Dazed in a recent interview. “I’d walk down the street expecting to be snatched up again”. Now living in exile, she said, “Unbewitched is about the act of conjuring a fairytale reality around yourself – constructing myths and fleeing from fear and pain into a dream.”  

Her uncanny images fuse fantasy with nightmare; the animal world with the human world in a kind of folk horror reverie. “I believe discomfort is essential in art,” she explains. “Society is obsessed with comfort and pleasure, but comfortable days are unremarkable.” Instead, she searches for images that sit between beauty and grotesquery, pulling viewers towards what might initially repel them. “We are naturally drawn to the monstrous and the ‘dirty’. Ugliness becomes desirable.” 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

NANCY HONEY

“Right from the very beginning, I wanted to examine how it feels, to explain what it is to be a woman,” photographer Nancy Honey told Dazed. A recent exhibition, specifically curated for Claire de Rouen by the shop’s new co-director Dominic Bell, drew on multiple bodies of work from the artist’s decades-long practice to cast a new eye over her enduring exploration of womanhood. What emerges is a playful, tender and nuanced portrait which gives us a glimpse into Honey’s unique vision on the multiplicity of female experience. Her images are defined by a unique lightness of touch that celebrates even as it commiserates – there is humour alongside the hardships. “Even though I feel like I have a lot of joie de vivre, I still think I’m talking about serious things,” she said. “Joy is serious.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

KUTT

Now the stuff of legend, the cult dyke zine KUTT ran from 2002 to 2003. Despite publishing just three issues, it garnered a committed following which has only increased in the years since it came to an end. So, thank god for IDEA Books, who have republished the trio of sought-after issues in one beautiful edition. On its signature lilac pages, look out for it-girl actor Chloë Sevigny, acclaimed writer and activist Eileen Myles, experimental filmmaker K8 Hardy, and feminist queer icon Merrill Nisker (aka Peaches), to name just a few of its highlights, alongside photography by Ryan McGinley, Collier Schorr, Viviane Sassen, Martien Mulder and many more. Capturing the burgeoning queer scene of the 00s, KUTT was, according to Myles, “evidence of how cool the new generation of lesbians who were around at that time were”.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

RYAN O’TOOLE COLLETT, A CAGED DOG BARKS THE FIERCEST

London-based photographer Ryan O'Toole Collett arrived in Mexico City during a febrile time in the run-up to a general election. As he began to try to learn more about the city and its politically charged climate, he began to interrogate some of his own misconceptions about Mexican culture. 

His photo project, A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest, presents 40 portraits of the city’s inhabitants, alongside their stories (presented in both Spanish and English). “I didn’t want to make grand establishing images that claimed to summarise the city,” he explains. Instead, it captures a network of people whose lives and communities overlap, and is more broadly “about how people negotiate who they are within contemporary social, political and economic conditions.” What emerges is a constellation of people and narratives which, Collet hopes, present a somewhat multifaceted perspective of life for Mexico City’s youth culture in the creative realms (his portraits explore overlapping creative scenes: DJs, artists, designers, writers, students, performers and club kids) rather than focusing on his lone experience as an outsider.

“I didn’t want to make grand establishing images that claimed to summarise the city,” he explained in a recent interview. Instead, it captures a network of people whose lives and communities overlap, and is more broadly “about how people negotiate who they are within contemporary social, political and economic conditions.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

ANGEL ODUKO AND MARC BAPTISTE, OMOGE

A collaboration between photographer Marc Baptiste and creative director Angel Oduko, OMOGE, is a compelling ode to the glamour of Old Nollywood films. Named after an affectionate Yoruba term for a beautiful and stylish woman, the project follows a group of Lagos-born, Brooklyn-based friends on a night out. “The cast is made up of myself, friends, acquaintances, and mutuals who fit into the visual world I was building,” Oduko told Dazed recently. “There is something exhilarating about being in a group of beautiful, confident women who are immaculately dressed. The night unfolded with true chaos as people slowed down their cars to compliment us.”

Styled by Lola Amu and Oyinkan Akin, their outfits and beauty are influenced by the maximalism and flamboyance of Old Nollywood films such as Girls Cot (2006) by Afam Okereke, Blood Sisters (2003) by Tchidi Chikere and End of the Wicked (1999) by Teco Benson. “I think people love Old Nollywood because of its rawness and authenticity,” Oduko explained. “Those films told more pedestrian stories, and I mean that as a compliment. They were about everyday people, everyday desires, and everyday betrayals, while still managing to be surreal and experimental.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

PETRA COLLINS, STAR

Petra Collins’ latest photo book, STAR, explores pop celebrity and fandom through its depiction of two fictional musical acts: Ashley, a solo star, and Siren8, a teen idol group. The project draws on Collins’ own firsthand experience of the pop world as an eminent photographer and music video director to reimagine the rise, fall and subsequent mystery surrounding her fantasy pop stars.

The story is told from the perspective of fans and stalkers, and the photographs are augmented with letters, conversations, and diary entries, alongside images of performances and promotional shoots. Rendered in Collins’ 00s aesthetic of glittery eyeshadow, camisoles, bows, glossy lips, DVDs and corkboard collages, it’s undercut with an undercurrent of darkness amid the glamour – a hospital ward, hands dripping with blood, tears, and the vacant expressions of a pharmaceutical haze.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

CHAD MOORE, EYES AND SKIES

As the title suggests, Chad Moore’s latest photo book presents his portraits of eyes, yes, alongside skies. The photographer, who also shot the cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, told Dazed, simply, “There’s a kind of truth in people’s eyes in a photograph.” 

Known for his disarming, candid portraits of friends and New York’s youth culture, there’s a life-affirming, wondrous quality in Moore’s photographs. It’s a pleasure and a joy to gaze at the world through his lens. And if you’ve ever felt there‘s something analogous about the cosmos and the depths of someone’s eyes – their glittering, vast potential – then this is the photo book for you. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.