“I had one frame left on the roll,” Norwegian-Vietnamese artist Kim Jakobsen Tô says about a photograph in Cedar Dreams, his debut monograph (published by Queer Street Press, London). Two naked figures share a chair, one seated in the lap of the other, their expressions composed, their gaze directed steadily at the lens. “It is really about preserving a single moment rather than working through possibilities. It is a very different way of making images digitally, where you can shoot endlessly and try everything.” Resolved in soft, diffuse grayscale, the image holds a mutual trust and curiosity between photographer and subject.

The camera Jakobsen Tô uses is central to understanding how these images came to exist. “People go a bit quiet when you bring it out,” he says of the Hasselblad 500 C/M, an analogue, entirely mechanical camera in which the photographer holds the body at waist height and looks down into the viewfinder rather than raising it to the eye. “The sitter understands something else is going on. There is mutual respect, from my side, and also from theirs.” This reciprocity defines the photographs throughout Cedar Dreams.

Shot between 2021 and 2026 during the years Jakobsen Tô was living in Mexico City, the photographs move between portraits of friends, lovers, collaborators, and elders from the city’s queer creative community, alongside members of Indigenous spiritual communities, among them Wixárika and Rarámuri peoples. Interwoven with these are landscapes and quieter observations of local shop fronts in the Calle Marsella area, frayed market tarpaulin held behind metal gates, a vast quarry lake with figures gathered at its edge, and still lifes.

There is something in Jakobsen Tô’s process that rhymes with the ceremonial world he has been welcomed into. “I find it connects to something in the ceremonies I attend,” he says, “where everything is elemental and physical with fire, wood, the things directly in front of you. The camera has that same physicality.”

The title itself also holds two registers. ‘Cedar’ refers to the sacred tree whose dried leaves are burned in the Four Tobacco ceremony, a Native American ritual in which smoke enables inner vision and connection with ancestry. And ‘Dreams’, as the Mexican writer Juan Pablo Ramos notes in the book’s accompanying essay, alludes not only to the oneiric quality of the images but to “hope, longing and a visionary state in which ancient wisdom can be channelled”.

Jakobsen Tô did not begin photographing the spiritual communities he moved among until an elder gave him explicit permission, framing the project as something he could make a prayer about. "I never photograph as an outsider. That’s always been important to me.” Most of the portraits were made in his own apartment. With the queer creative community, the approach was more organic. “It’s a contemporary community, and being photographed is part of life. You meet someone, you hang out, they come over on a Sunday, and you take some pictures.” But even here, the work was built on years of accumulated trust. “All of my friends in Mexico City who are in the arts and the creative world became part of the project naturally as I was living there.”

Mexico City made the synthesis between Jakobsen Tô's spiritual life and queer life almost inevitable. “It was a very good place to merge my two main worlds because you feel the spirituality there when you enter the city.” He was acutely aware of the pressure to keep these worlds separate, and to perform straightness in the mountains and leave his spiritual self at the door of the club. He resisted the idea when someone suggested the project might be two books: one queer and one spiritual. “It felt strange to separate things when, if it’s a project of a city, it has those elements so present together, intertwining.”

The refusal was both personal and political. Moving between a queer nightclub in the city and a ceremony in the mountains, he felt how the demand to belong fully to one world or the other was its own kind of rupture. “The world is getting more and more polarised. It became unnatural to polarise myself into these categories. The book was a way of trying to merge two sides of myself into one.” There is also a question of visibility, of queer people within spiritual communities who can feel profoundly alone. “Mexico is quite a macho country, and in certain communities you can feel that queerness doesn’t necessarily fit in there.” For Jakobsen Tô, the book became an act of reclamation: “to be able to claim my queerness wherever I am”.

Mexico City draws LGBTQ+ young people from across the country, many coming from deeply conservative states. In neighbourhoods like Juárez and Roma Norte, a loose ecology of artists, designers, photographers, musicians, and performers has produced a culture that is distinctly and unapologetically queer, visible in the zines and self-published books circulating through small galleries and club nights.

The book is dedicated to a friend of the photographer who died. The closing poem, Swallowing Rain is by Diego Gerard Morrison, who was Jakobsen Tô’s neighbour and a poet, and whose writing was chosen because it spoke directly to this grief. “He writes about someone who is there, but not there. They appear, but they don’t appear.” For Jakobsen Tô, the poem articulated something about friendship that continues after death. “It’s about a friendship that continues when someone has gone. Either someone you know well, or a queer icon or spiritual leader you never met but who is part of your understanding of who you are.”

The book was edited over two days on the floor of a flat in Hoxton, every image printed and spread across the floor, the sequence rebuilt again and again. Davide Meneghello of Queer Street Press describes the process as “a very sensitive approach, working through the sequence in a way that felt right, rather than trying to rationalise too much”. For Queer Street Press editor Sean Burns, Jakobsen Tô is “the connection that runs through the whole book. He connected to all these people, and that's the guide”.

Cedar Dreams is published as queer visibility is under pressure worldwide, with frameworks of legal protection and cultural recognition built over decades being questioned and dismantled. Into this comes a book that is not polemical or defensive, nor is it organised around protest. It simply shows people in their fullness, their tenderness, and their ordinary extraordinary grace and says: we were here. For Jakobsen Tô, “the book is an archive, not about the here and now, but an archive for the future”.

Cedar Dreams is published by Queer Street Press and is available here.