COVER STORIES
Latest on ZERO.NINE
The Archeological Bazaar
Photographer Federico Possati examines Italy’s Pianura Padana as a landscape reshaped by industry, consumption, and erasure. Through two years of photographic wandering, abandoned artefacts emerge as displaced relics of a hybrid territory. Presented beyond museum order, the images form a speculative archive where fragments collide, meanings shift, and history rearranges itself.
mother-land
In mother-land, artist Chia Yun Wu reflects on Taiwan’s political isolation through the intimate lens of migration and family separation. Layering personal photographs with evocative landscapes, Wu creates a parallel world shaped by memory, distance, and uncertainty. Through printmaking and drawing, the project maps a fragile space between belonging and alienation, where fluid borders and shifting identities reveal both quiet tension and enduring hope.
Innerland
Innerland is an ongoing series of portraits by Tania Shcheglova, capturing creatives from around the world – those who dare to look into their own souls and connect with the deepest parts of their psyche. Moving beyond traditional portraiture, the project uses ‘Staged Documentary’ to reveal humans as boundless, evolving extensions of their environments, reflecting the subconscious, emotional and spiritual landscapes that shape identity beyond physical appearance.
Castle in the Clouds
Photographer Lenny Steinhauer explores the fragile afterlife of a modernist social utopia that still functions today. The Ihme-Zentrum in Hanover is a brutalist structure caught between decay and persistence, revealing how a seemingly hopeless architectural vision is sustained by the people who continue to inhabit and give meaning to it.
Where is home
Photographer Hui Zhang presents a very personal body of work rooted in her experiences of growing up as a ‘left-behind child’ in suburban Beijing. Shaped by family separation and social inequality, her images revisit the people and places of her upbringing, revealing a quiet sense of longing, memory and calls into question: How do we define ‘home’?
The Internal Crusade
The Internal Crusade is a photographic project by Zexuan Zeng that explores the lasting influence of China’s “Long March” on everyday life and personal identity. Through a two-month journey along the historic route, Zeng documents how political narratives transform individual experiences into collective ideals, using images of people, places, and symbolic landscapes to question how history is constructed and internalised.
Banks Violette – When Loss Becomes Art
A fire glows behind the glass of TICK TACK in Antwerp, poised between comfort and destruction. It feels like a signal between welcoming yet alarming, stopping passersby in their tracks. From the darkness, a backwards sign reads The End, marking the threshold of Wish You Were Here, the recent exhibition by Banks Violette, curated by Maria Abramenko. On the eve of the opening, amid final checks and quiet tension, we spoke with Violette about grief, sound, and the collapse of America.
ICONS – Martin Parr: The Kitsch and the Lurid
Martin Parr’s aggressively colourful depiction of British life sparked enormous debate about what it meant to be British, and how as a deeply classist country we understand our own relationship to visualisations of class. We reflect on his revolutionary work after his recent passing.
Dreaming Cleaning
Dreaming Cleaning is a poignant documentary series by photographer Almudena Zambrana that moves between softness and strain, reverie and repetition. Drawing from her lived experience as a qualified migrant working as a cleaner in Australia, Zambrana reveals the emotional and psychological weight of repetitive, often unacknowledged labour. Through cyclical, dream-like imagery, the project exposes the fragile gap between education, identity and survival.
ANTIDOTE
Antidote is a framework of five photographic series and an academic essay exploring the rise of contemporary authoritarianism. Drawing on Indigenous worldviews, Marco Vernaschi proposes empathy as a counterforce to polarised ideologies. We speak with Vernaschi about power, psychology, and resistance.
Beauty Trends 2026
Looking ahead to beauty trends of 2026, the Spring/Summer runways set the tone with bold, expressive looks and futuristic flair. From 80s-inspired blush contour at Aadnevik to sci-fi metallics at Theophilio, designers embraced impact. Vivid blue carnival eyes as seen at Luar, next-level lashes at Thom Brown and graphic statement lips at Roksanda & Westwood signal a fearless new beauty era.
Jamnesia
Jamnesia is a meditation on obsession, endurance, and queer presence inside chaos. Colliding roller derby’s radical, bruised community with the unforgiving ritual of wet plate collodion, the project celebrates failure, devotion, and bodies that persist. It is about showing up — again and again — for art, impact, and belonging.
Memories of Dust
Photographer Alex Bex interrogates the cowboy myth and the codes of traditional masculinity. Immersed in ranching communities, the project reveals vulnerability behind the archetype, questioning how images shape manhood in a society undergoing profound cultural change today, urgently, and without nostalgia.
ICONS – Lee Miller
Lee Miller’s sprawling odyssey of a life is a profound achievement. She changed the world as a model, artist and journalist during World War II, leaving a deeper mark on all three disciplines than most people could hope to achieve in a lifetime. We take a look at her tour-de-force career.
Mille-Feuilles
Mille-Feuilles (A Thousand Layers) is a decade-long photographic project exploring bi-national identity, inherited longing, and imagined belonging. Through layered, fragmentary images, it traces memory, migration, and placeless desire, questioning how images can become a refuge when home exists only as absence, fiction, and feeling.
In case you missed it
The Grass Needs to Be Cut
The Grass Needs to Be Cut is a photographic project made in northern Portugal by Bruno Pereira Ribeiro, unfolding across seasons and repeated encounters with the tradition of Chegas de Bois. Through bulls, landscapes, and social rituals, the work examines power, place, and community, revealing a nuanced portrait of a region shaped by tradition and environment.
VOYEUR2 – Capturing desire, control and intimacy
Voyeur2 brings together eight photographers whose work interrogates kink and eroticism across multiple genders, sexualities and subcultures. For ZERO.NINE, curator and contributor Matt Ford interviewed Joaquin, a London-based gay portrait photographer who has spent over a decade inside the city’s fetish scene and is also part of the exhibition. He has shaped the visual identity of Fetish Week London and Recon, collaborated with the Tom of Finland Foundation, and contributed to major kink archives and exhibitions.
Star Witness
Dallas born dancer-drummer-DJ turned star producer and now performer ZACH WITNESS has established himself as one of the most in-demand music makers of the day – working with the likes of Erykah Badu, André 3000, Nile Rodgers, Doechii and upcoming sensation Infinite Coles. Now, he releases his boldest EP to date.