Nevermore – When beauty and innocence turn to threat, it becomes horror

PHOTOGRAPHY

Oct 29

Halloween beauty inspired by the poetry of my personal favourite Edgar Allan Poe and newly discovered Sayat Nova, where heartache becomes art and nature and fruit have symbolic meaning. We explore themes of melancholy, disgust, decay, entrapment, and emotional fragility from poetry, film, and folklore.

Beauty Editor/Makeup Artist/Origami Claudine Blythman  Photography Philip Blythman

MOTH MAC Pro Palette Paintstick: Rich Purple & Process Magenta, MAC Face Glass, Ethical Taxidermy @etsy

RAVEN & RUFFLE Rabanne Pure Metals Metal Dust, Rabanne Colorshot 1969 & Black Lune, Rabanne Love Balm Soul Kiss

BEE Danessa Myricks Colorfix Glaze Clear, Rabanne Palette Paradise Lost, Then Found, Rituel De Fille The Black Orb, Ethical Taxidermy @etsy

ORIGAMI ROSES YSL Eyeliner Unconditional Marine, Anastasia Beverly Hills Fall Romance Eye Palette, Merit Tinted Lip Oil Tabby, Merit Flush Balm Apres

**POMEGRANATE** MAC Dazzleshadow Telepathic Teal, MAC Frost Lipstick Jet, MAC Triennial Wave, MAC In The Shadows

Team credits

Beauty Editor/Makeup Artist/Origami: Claudine Blythman
Photographer: Philip Blythman
Hairstylist: Guido Ferranti
Model: Mimi at Uno Models
Thanks to Enrique LLorens

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Halloween beauty inspired by the poetry of my personal favourite Edgar Allan Poe and newly discovered Sayat Nova, where heartache becomes art and nature and fruit have symbolic meaning. We explore themes of melancholy, disgust, decay, entrapment, and emotional fragility from poetry, film, and folklore.

National Character

In National Character, photographer John Sanderson travels across the American landscape in search of a country increasingly hidden in plain sight. Working with a 4×5 film camera, he takes the long way around – leaving major highways for small roads and carrying a demanding piece of photographic history into places shaped by industry, decline and change. His commitment to the journey is reflected in the photographs: patient, precise and quietly melancholic, they find a strange beauty in the overlooked corners of America.

52 Weeks – Stolen and Preserved

Over a year, Leicester-based artist and educator Clair Robins turned her camera toward her teenage daughter. 52 Weeks – Stolen and Preserved traces a quiet negotiation between mother and child: some moments offered, others withheld. Moving between spontaneous portraiture, still life and tactile process, it is a tender record of becoming, and of letting go.

Rite of Passage

New Delhi-based visual artist Noor Kaur Randhawa explores the experience of growing up as a young woman in a world shaped by the threat of male violence and control. Photographing herself and her friends, she captures the ways they navigate fear, resistance, intimacy and freedom — from learning to call out the men around them to reclaiming their bodies, clothes and spaces. A portrait of coming of age, on their own terms.

My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory

In My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory, Ariana Gomez explores grief, identity and the landscapes that shape us. Born from the loss of her father, the project moves between the arid terrain of Texas and her mother’s Puerto Rican heritage, constructing a shared mythology from fragments of memory and archive – and bringing three generations together in a space between what was, what remains, and what might have been.

Geography of Disappearance

Marcus DeSieno photographs the exact sites along the US–Mexico border where migrants have disappeared, died or their bodies were recovered, reconstructing these locations through autopsy reports and humanitarian records. The project began after DeSieno encountered a dying migrant in an Arizona gas station. Made in the Sonoran Desert using laborious darkroom processes, his landscapes become haunting records of absence, death and remembrance.

Torn Between The Light

Shot along the wild coastline of Scotland – ‘Between the light’ is a visual study on the space between bond and bounded. The series explores the strain of being tethered and what ties two people together. The points of tension and ease. A world between light and dark, where we are torn by those closest to us.

Snake Family

Photographer Emily Chalk spent two weeks in Marrakesh photographing the Sadik family, one of only five families still practising the 500-year-old tradition of snake charming in Jemaa el-Fna. What begins with fear and assumptions about the practice develops into an intimate encounter with trust, inheritance and disappearing traditions – revealing the lives, rituals and relationships that exist beyond the spectacle.

Movement

In Movement, Ukrainian photographer Roman Butym reflects on the relentless pace of contemporary life. His ongoing series portrays people lying in public spaces, appearing almost like exhausted objects suspended between movement and stillness. Against a world of constant mobility and information overload, Butym’s images explore anxiety, isolation and the quiet vulnerability hidden beneath the illusion of always being ‘in the flow’.

What Stillness Reveals

Photographer Eleonora Laufer explores the quiet spaces where presence lingers beneath the surface of everyday life. Shaped by her background in dance, yoga and meditation, her images embrace stillness as a way of seeing rather than an absence of activity. Through minimal compositions and subtle traces of the human, Laufer invites us to slow down and discover moments of connection, attention and reflection that often go unnoticed.

Inyeon

Inyeon is a Korean word for the connections between people that feel deeper than coincidence. In this series, the relationship between father and son unfolds slowly and intuitively, without a fixed narrative, focused not on specific moments but on presence itself.

Where the Water Waits

In Where the Water Waits, photographer Michael Behlen explores California's Millerton Lake as a landscape suspended between control and uncertainty. Created over three years using rare monochromatic Polaroid Reclaimed Blue film, the project captures the reservoir during storms, transforming a heavily engineered water system into an atmospheric meditation on impermanence, memory, and the ever-changing relationship between land and water.

Contrapasso

In Contrapasso, Italian photographer Massimiliano Corteselli examines the mythological and archetypal dimensions of man-made wildfires in the Mediterranean. Drawing on Dante Alighieri's concept of divine retribution, the project weaves together photography, folklore, and symbolism to reflect on greed, vengeance, and humanity's relationship with the land, creating a visual narrative that shifts between documentary, myth, and social critique.

Breaking Point

Why would someone confess to a crime they never committed? In this powerful photobook, Robin Dahlberg collaborates with six exonerees to uncover the hidden realities of coercive police interrogations. Through striking portraits and firsthand testimonies, the book exposes the psychological pressures that led innocent people to confess, revealing a justice system where truth can be dangerously fragile.

For Ghana’s Women Boxers, Survival Outside the Ring Is the Hardest Fight

In Jamestown's storied boxing gyms, women like Yarkor Chavez and Naa Amerley Turkson opened a path now walked by Abigail Quartey and Janet Acquah — fighting not just opponents, but poverty, stigma and indifference. Olaoluwa Olowu's Women Who Fight traces three generations of Ghana's female boxers, supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Para La Cultura y Fútbol

Para La Cultura y Fútbol (For the Culture and Football) explores identity as something lived, fluid, and continually evolving. Through collaboration, colour, and personal expression, New York–based photographer Ivana Cajina creates powerful images that celebrate community, individuality, and cultural heritage, honouring the beauty of identity in motion through shared experience and self-expression.

Gelli Haha: Enter the Gelliverse

We spoke to the rising, primary coloured star that is Gelli Haha at Primavera Sound 2026. Angel Abaya, known professionally as Gelli Haha, has been featured in Pitchfork, NME and Billboard following her latest album. We spoke to her about her relationship to silliness, vaudeville, and Liza Minnelli.

Primavera Sound 2026: Showmanship

Primavera Sound 2026 was a love letter to glamour and grunge, with unforgettable performances by the likes of The Cure, Olivia Rodrigo, Ethel Cain and Kneecap. We take a look at the festival’s highlights.

Last Orders

Drinks photographer Ned Gibbs turns his lens toward the fading heart of England’s pub culture. Documenting pubs in quiet decline, the series captures the atmosphere, nostalgia and human traces left behind in these communal spaces. Both elegy and celebration, the work reflects Gibbs’ enduring fascination with the rituals, stories and connections formed around drinking culture.

My Nipples Get Harder Than Your Dick

“My Nipples Get Harder Than Your Dick” is an ongoing project by non-binary photographer Maria Bolz exploring gender identity, bodily autonomy, and external perception through self-portraiture. Blending vulnerability with humour, Bolz confronts the projections and misunderstandings imposed onto their body, reclaiming the gaze as an act of resistance and self-determination.

Meteor Ghosts

In Meteor Ghosts, photographer Florian Luthi revisits a little-known 1954 UFO case in the Jura, tracing how a children’s story evolved into local folklore and international sensation. Blending archival research, documentary photography, and staged imagery, the project explores the fragile space between testimony and invention across the mist-covered landscapes of the French-Swiss border.

En suspens — regards d'une jeunesse

This collaborative fine-art photography project by Romane Bladou, explores teenage life in rural southern France. Photographed with a large-format camera, it captures the liminal energy of adolescence, the waiting, the ardour, the quiet act of claiming space. A portrait of a territory seen through its youngest inhabitants' eyes.

Strawberry Blue

Strawberry Blue is a meditative fine-art photography project by Marinos Tsagkarakis, set in a dreamlike Dutch park. Born from the aftermath of migration, it traces an intimate journey of displacement, identity and wandering slowly transforms into growing new roots.

SEEN – Haircuts4Homeless

Photographer Jack Eames has spent years documenting Haircuts4Homeless, using his fashion and beauty background to create portraits that humanise people experiencing homelessness. His exhibition, SEEN, in partnership with Capture One, brings that work into a physical space — challenging how we see vulnerability, identity, and our shared humanity.

Remains

In Remains, photographer Hamzeh Zahran reflects on returning to Amman with the distance of diaspora, confronting a fractured sense of home. Through black-and-white imagery, he traces tensions between past and present, family and self, capturing intimate and symbolic moments that reveal what endures – and what feels irrevocably altered – in his evolving relationship with Jordan.

I Hope Your Family is Safe

Anya Tsaruk’s project “I Hope Your Family Is Safe” is named after a phrase she has heard many times since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine – words meant to comfort, but that feel uncertain and hard to answer. Her work explores what ‘safety’ really means in a country at war. Through everyday scenes of loss, love and resilience, she shows a more human, complex picture of Ukraine beyond simple victim narratives.

A Dream That You Would Never Wake Up

A Dream That You Would Never Wake Up From explores migration as a perpetual crossing between lands, memories and identities. Through collaged photographs, the artist reflects on displacement, ancestral histories and emotional borders. Nostalgia becomes visceral, belonging remains fragile, and the past persists as a dreamlike terrain where personal and collective histories quietly intertwine.

Rain & Shine

Glossy and shimmery beauty looks return with a dash of imperfection. Is it a nostalgic reminder of times when print media, your inner circle, or cultural knowledge dominated? Perhaps it’s a doppelgänger to clean, perfectly applied neutral beauty dictated by online tutorials from beauty influencers or industry experts.

Beirut, Recurring Dream

Photographer Tanya Traboulsi explores Beirut as a landscape shaped by memory, exile, and imagination. Blending photographs with archival traces, the work navigates the tension between past and present, reality and fiction. The series is a lived place and dreamscape: fragile, unresolved, and continuously reimagined through the echoes of personal and collective history.

Gipsy Horses

Photographer Charly García discovered an unexpected cowboy community in Flanders, Belgium – far from the landscapes usually associated with this culture. He spent nine months alongside them, documenting daily routines, work, and moments of quiet between events. Rather than focusing on rodeo spectacle, his photographs centre on the people themselves, revealing the relationships, gestures, and everyday lives that sustain the community.

Christian Trippe

Nevermore – When beauty and innocence turn to threat, it becomes horror

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National Character