COVER STORIES
Latest on ZERO.NINE
Paw Paradox
Paw Paradox is a thought-provoking project by German photographer Caroline Heinecke that explores the surreal history of animal trials — where pigs, insects and even elephants were brought before human courts. By blending AI-generated imagery with documentary photography, Heinecke investigates the shifting boundaries of legal rights, ownership and agency between species.
Days on the Way
Shot entirely on an iPhone inside the women-only carriages of the Tehran–Karaj metro line, Days on the Way is Parastoo Ghahremanifard’s raw and poetic study of in-between moments. What begins as a daily commute unfolds into a meditation on silence, repetition, and quiet defiance. Parastoo documents a suspended reality where exhaustion is etched into faces. In this overlooked public space, the everyday becomes a stage for both weariness and resilience.
ENNUI
With ENNUI, Giuliana Borrelli reflects on the quiet weight of disconnection and the search for self within the spaces we call home. Moving between her childhood home in Italy and her current life in Norway, the project traces a deeply personal journey — one marked by silence, longing, and the slow, transformative act of reclaiming identity.
The eerie Queerness of Jenkin van Zyl
In Lost Property (2025) video artist Jenkin van Zyl invites viewers into a looping bureaucratic dreamscape where the lost isn’t luggage—it’s selfhood. Known for his cinematic hallucinations, van Zyl blurs the lines between fantasy and surveillance, rendering bureaucratic absurdity as a theatre of horror. In our exclusive interview, we delve into the making of Lost Property, the queerness of cannibalism, the politics of overconsumption and how dressing up becomes a form of resistance to our bleak times.
Soumoud In Dark Times
In Soumoud In Dark Times, Palestinian artist Rehab Nazzal documents life under siege in the West Bank during Israel’s intensified occupation from October 2023 to November 2024. Through 41 poignant images, she captures devastation, resilience, and the visual truth of a people resisting erasure during what many have called a live-streamed genocide.
Bravo
In Bravo, artist Felipe Romero Beltrán crafts a quiet yet powerful meditation on migration, identity, and resilience along the US–Mexico border. Set within the charged landscape of the Rio Bravo, his work captures the tension of waiting, where absence speaks as loudly as presence and time itself becomes a suspended, fragile state.
You Never Walk Alone
You Never Walk Alone, a photo series by Katya Ilina, offers an intimate portrait of London’s K-pop fandom. With warmth and clarity, Ilina captures a vibrant subculture where predominantly female and queer fans reclaim space, challenge gendered biases, and transform shared passion into a powerful expression of identity and joy.
Chrysalis
Chrysalis is a visual series by Georgiana Feidi, a Cluj-Napoca–based artist whose work bridges digital and analogue techniques. Exploring Earth as a living organism in transformation, Feidi blends surreal imagery, post-processing and ethereal tones to reflect on nature’s cycles, human interconnectedness, and the quiet power of planetary renewal.
Alana S. Portero: Bad Habit and Beyond
Alana S. Portero’s transgender coming-of-age novel Bad Habit recently celebrated its second anniversary. Praised by director Pedro Almodóvar and recently featured on Dua Lipa’s ‘Service95’ book club, Portero’s book speaks to a vulnerable life lived at a dangerous time. Bad Habit follows the narrator’s life in 1980s post-Franco Spain and the influential people in her life, almost all marred as abject in some way or another.
What truly defines us?
Elzbieta Zdunek’s digital collages explore themes of identity, perception, and the pressure of external judgment. Her work questions how many versions of the self exist, shaped by context and subjective interpretation.
ICONS – Irving Penn: Still Life and its Pleasures
Penn’s Still Life work, one subsection of an eminent career in photography and the arts, speaks to the power of a genre rarely viewed as gripping. A staple of the arts world for generations, and the throughline through all of Penn’s work, Still Life will always endure. How might Penn’s work allow us to see it for what it is?
Lipsticks
Objects hold stories. Not just in their use, but in their wear, their shape, and the silence they witness. In the intimate space where beauty meets routine, something deeper is revealed. This project by Stacy Greene began with a glance, but quickly unfolded into a quiet investigation of identity, memory, and form.
Jeanie Crystal: Blood, Sweat, Possession
With raw blues, punk fury, and unapologetic truth, Jeanie’s shows blur the line between ritual and rebellion. As her band Jeanie and The White Boys rise, she talks to us about power, pain, identity, and the beautiful chaos that fuels it all.
A legend in new light
15 years after he co-directed How To Train Your Dragon, Dean DeBlois is soaring back to The Isle of Berk with a new version of Hiccup and Toothless in live-action. DeBlois exclusively opens up about the challenges that come with remaking a beloved animation while discussing what the story means to him and how he's doing the original justice.
Die Schlange (The Snake)
With her project Die Schlange, photographer Nancy Jesse presents a hauntingly intimate and cinematic portrayal of life within a surreal architectural organism. The vast Berlin housing complex has been built above a motorway and contains over 1,000 apartments. Her use of light and framing evokes a dreamlike, almost dystopian atmosphere—subtly echoing the building's strange, pulsating core.
In case you missed it
The Anthropocene Illusion
British photographer Zed Nelson has just been awarded ‘Photographer of the Year’ for his series ‘The Anthropocene Illusion’. His work focuses beyond the destructive human impact on the natural world, examining the sterile environments humans have built to satiate our craving for natural spaces. We spoke exclusively to Zed about what inspired him, his approach and how the project developed over the course of six years.
Fists of Hope
Fists of Hope, a quietly powerful photo documentary by Olaoluwa Olowu, follows the life of Janet, a young female boxer fighting to rise in Ghana’s male-dominated boxing scene. Set against the raw backdrop of Jamestown, this project captures not only the physical intensity of her training but also the emotional endurance required to survive invisibility, poverty and systemic neglect.
Urban Reverie: The Argall Edition
In the bustling corner of an East London industrial estate, where concrete sprawls beneath cash n carry skylights and graffiti climbs rusting bridges, fashion finds unexpected beauty. Urban Reverie is a love letter to a gritty contrast—lace brushing steel, vinyl gleaming against brick, softness swaggering through spaces never meant for softness.