There are strong currents of fantasy and identity running through this month’s most loved photo stories. From Camille Vivier’s “dangerously seductive” and fantastical visions of the female form to Walter Pfeiffer’s theatrical pursuit of beauty and Ryan McGinley’s cinematic vision of New York at night. Kim Jakobsen Tô documented his queer friends and loved ones in Mexico City alongside the Indigenous spiritual communities he encountered, thereby uniting two profoundly important dimensions of the city. Meanwhile, Walter Vandenbrink’s latest photo book, Wolves, sees him prowling the streets of European cities in a study of youth and collectivity; Ornella Mari navigates the disorientating experience of adolescence, and Megha Singha documents beauty influencers engaged in constructing and performing their identities online. 

RYAN MCGINLEY, NIGHT SHIFT

Ryan McGinley shot his latest body of work, Night Shift, on the streets of New York between 9pm at night and 5am in the morning, casting the nude models he worked with from among his artist friends. “It was an amazing window. Nobody was out, so we had the streets to ourselves, which made us feel like anything was possible,” the legendary photographer told Dazed in a recent interview.  “New Yorkers are really desensitised to just how crazy our city is, so making this work here felt normal for all my models who are also New Yorkers. This is a spontaneous city where making art on the street is not uncommon.” 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

WALTER PFEIFFER, IN GOOD COMPANY

With over 100 works spanning the early 70s to the present, Walter Pfeiffer’s In Good Company traces this eminent image-maker’s unique, theatrical visual language over decades in his never-ending pursuit of beauty. “I can never stop chasing beauty,” he told Lillian Wilkie in a recent interview on Dazed. “There’s no time to stop, because you might find beauty when you least expect it.” As Wilkie writes, “Pfeiffer’s highly saturated photographs and film works collapse distinctions between personal and commercial practice, mapping out a lexicon of sexuality and desire, comedy and consumption. That his heroes were Cecil Beaton and Andy Warhol makes sense: his sensitivity to formal beauty and regal flair is matched only by his affinity for hustlers, outsiders, and all things underground and avant-garde.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

CAMILLE VIVIER

As described by writer Alessandro Merola in a recent feature on Dazed, Camille Vivier’s work is “high-voltage, theatrical and dangerously seductive”, drawing on elements of “fantasy, fetishism, mythology, romance, underground culture and horror”. In the wake of her major exhibition at the MEP in Paris, we spoke to the acclaimed photographer about her compelling constellation of disparate references, the women in her life, and her latest obsessions. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

ORNELLA MARI, THROUGH HARDSHIP TO THE STARS

Ornella Mari’s debut photo book, Through Hardship to the Stars, is about the sense of jarring dislocation of being in a body (especially that of being in a girl’s body), the slippage between expectation and experience, and the painful process of acquiring self-knowledge and forming an identity amid all the chaos of growing up. From open mouths to bruised legs, mascara-streaked faces, meat, prosthetic limbs, vicious dogs, erotic selfies and roadkill, bodies appear throughout, in various ways. 

“Femininity never felt like something I naturally possessed. It felt like something I was expected to perform correctly,” she explained during a recent interview in Dazed. “The project became a space where I could separate my own understanding of womanhood from the expectations that surrounded it.” The title of the project is a direct translation of the Latin phrase Per aspera ad astra, which the photographer heard when she was young and stayed with her as a hopeful mantra. “For a long time, I thought the ‘stars’ represented some future version of myself who would eventually figure everything out,” she says. But over time, that idea shifted. “Now I see the stars as moments of self-recognition rather than a destination.” 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

MEGHA SINGHA, I LOVE MY FRIENDS, BUT THEY’RE KILLING ME

Megha Singha’s ongoing photo project contemplates the performance of beauty. The Mumbai-based photographer immersed herself in researching online beauty culture and beauty influencers. “I spent most of 2024 understanding this world, talking to the girls and getting to know them as I didn’t want my own preconceptions, good or bad, to influence the images,” she explained in a recent interview with Dazed. I Love My Friends, But They’re Killing Me isn’t a critique of India’s beauty influencers, but rather an exploration of how expressions of beauty have been globalised, and how ideas of femininity and desire have evolved in the process. Singha’s portraits take us inside the bedrooms of her subjects, allowing us a glimpse not only of the individuals in their private spaces, but an insight into their fantasies and rituals.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

KIM JAKOBSEN TÔ, CEDAR DREAMS

Moving between Mexico City’s queer nightclubs and ancient ceremonies in the mountains, photographer Kim Jakobsen Tô spent 2021 to 2024 creating a body of ethereal 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). Cedar Dreams brings together these mystical portraits from these important dimensions of Mexico City’s culture

“You feel the spirituality there when you enter the city,” he told Dazed recently. Recalling his decision to unite the portraits into one project, he said, “It felt strange to separate things when, if it’s a project of a city, it has those elements so present together, intertwining. 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.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

WINTER VANDENBRINK, WOLVES

Winter Vandenbrink’s latest photo book is a study of youth and collectivity. Shot on the streets of European cities, the Dutch-born, Paris-based photographer examines young men moving in packs. “I’ve always been interested in the togetherness of groups," he told Dazed in a recent interview. "Even when I was describing the behaviour of the individual, they always belonged to a certain kind of group.” As echoed in One or Several Wolves?, a text by psychoanalytic philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, reprinted at the back of the book: “You can’t be one wolf, you’re always eight or nine, six or seven.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.