COVER STORIES
Latest on ZERO.NINE
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Archipelago
Archipelago explores the fragile balance between connection and solitude. Through staged scenes featuring friends and family, Yolanda del Amo examines how class, family, and gender shape our identities and relationships. Each photograph becomes an “island”: a quiet, charged space where intimacy and distance coexist, revealing the tensions of living together and apart.
Bat Portraits
Dr. José Martínez-Fonseca’s series Bat Portraits reflects his commitment to documenting wildlife in some of the world’s most understudied regions. Guided by a belief that photography and research can transform fear into understanding, he captures intimate, revealing portraits that highlight bats’ beauty and ecological importance. His images invite us to look closer – and to reconsider animals often misunderstood or overlooked.
Léonard Pongo: Apophenia
Congolese artist Léonard Pongo’s first solo show in the UK, Apophenia, explores ways of knowing a place as rich and complex as the DRC. He interprets the land as a reactive entity in an attempt to show that a living body of knowledge is a valuable as other more sterile ways of knowing a place. It’s a deeply moving act of decolonisation that functions on an almost sensory level. We spoke to him about his work.
Invisible Sun
Invisible Sun is a deeply personal photography book from photographer Amani Willett and Dust Collective. A visual meditation on survival, transformation, and fragility, the project traces the impact of childhood medical traumas and the ways they continue to reverberate through the present.
Wallis – Bites Back Hard
While some artists write about love, Wallis prefers to write about the aftermath. We caught up with her in the studio where she’s recording her next single, talking bad exes, worse DMs, and all the chaos that makes great music.
In case you missed it
No Place Like Home
Inspired by Dorothy’s famous words, No Place Like Home reimagines the idea of home as both comfort and illusion. Set within an imaginary doll’s house, the series explores memory, loss, and identity, where the longing to return collides with the inescapable confines of nostalgia, femininity, and the shifting meaning of belonging.
Gumsucker
Gumsucker by Rory King mourns the vanishing Australian wilderness and the quiet erosion of spirit that follows. Through haunting, tender images of isolation and resilience, King’s work traces the tension between nature and civilisation, where loss, memory, and belonging intertwine in a poetic reflection on the fading frontier and its lingering ghosts.
Bobby Soutar – Wicked Wednesday
From Wednesday weirdness and Wicked spectacle to Bridgerton elegance, Emmy-winning costume designer Bobby Soutar has stitched his way through some of the most iconic looks on screen. In our exclusive interview, he reveals how he went from acting to costumes, the chaos behind the seams and why 50s fashion is his dream playground.