In our ongoing series highlighting Dazed Club talent, we meet the emerging Dazed Club photographers to look out for
Dazed Club Spotlight is our monthly series showcasing up-and-coming talent from the Dazed creative community. If you’d like to be featured, download the app HERE and join our community. You just have to post your best project(s) and the Dazed team will take a look – we select one person from the community to spotlight per week.
“I can’t begin to tell you how excited I get when I get to produce a project accompanied by a narrative. As a DIY girl, I find so much joy in imagining, building, and crafting. I prefer creating non-naturalistic scenes that can only be imagined. The complexity of human emotions, behaviour, and thinking fascinates me, so exploring and building a set around what that can look like is my favourite thing to do.
“My main focus in my photography revolves around people. I love getting a feel for my subjects’ moods, states of mind, and personalities. This way, the results are a combination of pre-production, on-set creativity, and the subject’s energy merged. I find it pivotal to leave room for this sort of expression, it allows the final images to have a personality of their own.
“I love it when I get the chance to elevate an image with an external medium. I like playing around with 3D computer graphics at any opportunity, this allows me to add new elements and dimensions to my work. On a simpler note, recently I’ve loved experimenting with gel and paper cutouts, placing them in front of my lens for the shot. Getting lost in post-production is also something I tend to do. I often create multiple different versions of an image before I decide which one I am going to use.”
”My practice is focused on capturing the unconventional beauty of the human form. My photography is a mix of documentary and staged portraiture, with a focus on experimentation and intimacy. I’m attracted to the fantasy of fashion and have always loved how it devises entirely new narratives. I frequently return to themes of femininity, queerness, gender fluidity, and the performance of identity. Pushing boundaries and challenging representation in the fashion industry have always played a fundamental role in my work.
“My community is found in my hometown of Bucharest. Our creative scene is filled with fantasy and art, as well as hardship, challenges, and a collective desire to evolve. At the same time, it’s full of ambiguities – there’s a dichotomy between Western ideals and maintaining our Eastern European identity.
“Some of the processes I use in my image-making are experimenting with mediums, mixing analogue and digital photography. I appreciate the uncertainty, almost anxiety of shooting on film, and the rawness of digital techniques, that provide me more of a sense of freedom. I’m very inspired by the past, especially by the 90s, and I like looking back at that era of fashion photography and recreating it in my own way. I find my biggest inspiration in women – women in my life and women I follow – artists, filmmakers, photographers, activists, mothers. There is so much beauty in the resilience of women. For a long time, I photographed men and I tried to challenge ideas and performances of masculinity in my work. Recently, I’ve shifted towards capturing women, influenced by my own journey into womanhood – I found image-making as a platform for self-discovery and exploration.”
“I thrive on collaborating with young and emerging talents in Paris, where I’m currently living. I approach each shoot as if I’m preparing a dish; selecting the best ingredients from my surroundings to create a cohesive burst of flavour.
“In terms of process, I shoot both digital and analogue. With digital photography, I enjoy playing with textures during post-production that I create myself. For analogue, I scan the negatives myself to achieve the desired result, which is often a fuzzy depth and painterly quality.
“Currently, I find myself particularly inspired by the analogue process. Scanning the negatives myself allows for a more tactile approach to photography, which helps me refine my image-capturing techniques on set. I view analogue photography more akin to painting; clicking the shutter only when I’m certain I’ve captured an iconic moment!”
“The focus point of my practice is mainly collaborating with friends who have a drive in what they do – whether it be music, fashion or art. My friends really inspire me to develop a concept that suits their body of work, which is always a fun process. My other focus point in my work is the queer London rave scene. The beauty of capturing a candid moment of the girls being their authentic, raw selves and surrounded by love speaks to me more than anything.
“I find endless inspiration by living in a warehouse here in London surrounded by people working across various creative subjects – it’s an environment that makes me more focussed on my craft. Since moving to London at the start of 2023, my work has expanded through the relationships I have made in the queer scene, making connections with people who have similar inspirations as I do. As someone from a small town in Ireland, I didn’t really have that connection to queer culture other than in the Internet realm. A lot of my recent work is usually in collaboration with people I feel most comfortable around, which is very important to me as a developing artist.
“My technique for taking photos is very loose. I don’t necessarily have a strict way of shooting and I’m still constantly learning new techniques and approaches each time I shoot. There’s something so satisfying about not knowing what you’re going to do or encounter when you are in post-production, which is why I like to be loose with the process when taking the photos – it’s more exciting to me that way. I tend to get a lot of my concepts and inspirations around the music I am listening to during that time frame – recently that’s been Arca – who’s a massive and enduring influence in my work – as well as more ambient artists like Chihei Hatakeyama.”
