“You watch an 18-year-old navigating bigger emotions, bigger spaces, intimate relationships”

Dalia Al-Dujaili: Why was this the right moment to publish Davide’s journals?  

Francesca Sorrenti: Now felt like the right time because I could finally approach these journals with a different state of mind, the material was simply too intimate, now I can see it as an essential part of his legacy, and this generation is ready to see him without the noise around his story. We are living in a moment when people crave the real thing, and emotional depth, especially in contrast to the digital world. Davide’s handwriting, his collages, the way he documented his friends and the city – all of it resonates more powerfully now. The journals speak directly to today’s thirst for knowledge, for something real.  

DA: You’ve established a publishing relationship with IDEA. What makes IDEA the right publisher to work with Davide’s imagery and journals?  

FS: IDEA is the right publisher because they understand the human element of youth culture, photography, and fashion in a way few others do. They immediately recognised Davide’s voice and the energy of his generation, and they treated his work with the respect and precision it deserves, not as nostalgia, but as living culture. 

DA: How does your personal relationship with your late son help to shape the pages we see? 

FS: My relationship with Davide shaped the edit simply because I knew him as a teenager, not as the cultural figure he later became after his passing. I could separate the noise from what was really his voice. When creating the book, I focused on keeping the pages exactly as he created them, honest, fast, unfiltered, without imposing my own interpretation. My role was to protect the integrity of what he wrote and saw, not to rewrite it. 

DA: What can we expect from the proceeding Volumes? 

FS: The next volume and the last of his journals continue the same approach. Davide’s pages are shown exactly as he made them. As Journal 2 progresses, you see him change. His understanding of photography becomes more technical and deliberate, and he starts stepping  deeper into the gritty side of downtown New York and the ’90s fashion world. His circle widens  skaters, models, musicians, young artists, other photographers and an important girlfriend  enters the picture, adding another layer to his personal world. You watch an 18-year-old navigating bigger emotions, bigger spaces, intimate relationships, and a growing creative ambition. Together, the volumes show how quickly he was evolving and how naturally he was finding his place in that moment. Journal Two is the evolution of Davide Sorrenti.

Davide Sorrenti Journals: Volume 1 1994-1995 is available at IDEA

In sunkissed portraits against the pastel tones of the buildings, the red earth and purple skies, Terry finds the “beautiful whilst referring to really some of these big potentially problematic themes.” Photographed sitting in a striped top he captures the elderly man, who shared so much about the place he once lived. “He is obviously the physical photographic representation of all of these people who would have had this attachment to the land that are now forced to live away from a place they love and cherish.” In the book he attributes a quote to him: “if I could return to the river, I would have already started running.”

In images, the photographer draws on his stories: a beautiful white goat recalls the story of the one slaughtered to appease Nyaminyami, the serpent-like river god, who villagers called on for protection after their displacement in 1958 following the construction of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River. The anger of the river god is said to have caused devastating floods during the dam’s construction as the rock by the entrance to the gorge close to the dam wall site, which was regarded as the home of Nyaminyami, would be buried more than a hundred feet below the water surface. Terry went to the area it was believed to have been sacrificed and stayed with the descendants of the tribe that had carried out this act.

When the Lake Kariba dam wall was opened by the Queen Mother on 17th May 1960, along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, it was declared an engineering feat: “the white man in Africa conquering the wild Zambezi river,” says Terry. It was supposed to produce the cheapest electricity in the world. But it destroyed more habitat than any engineering project before it. Gone was the life of abundance people described before, where the rich river soil meant most things would grow, and instead was a hard life. The resettled populations had been relocated to areas where the soil is really arid.” They work really hard, they survive off the land, but very meagrely,” says Terry.

The communities who were displaced were promised to be taken care of but as the title of his book alludes to, there was this “sort of grand colonial deception,” he says. “I was meeting with resettled tribes who still 60 years after the construction of this lake don’t have running water, don’t have electricity. The dam was built for hydroelectric power but some of these tribes who live less than 20 to 40 kilometers away from the lake shore still have no electricity,” Terry says. They were promised the ability to go back to fishing, hunting and farming; and told they would be given an allowance and have houses built for them but “there’s a continued lack of acknowledgments of the resettlement terms, things that were promised to these people that were never delivered.”

It’s not always the struggles that Terry captures but he does show life on the lake as it is now: villagers drying maramba fish under electric blue fishing nets; a moth lit up against the sun glistening in the Chibwatata Hot Springs; Charara Point where young boys dive into the lake; the homes of his fixers and friends where photographs crowd the walls; and the silhouette of Zimbabwe’s white cowboys against a barely lit sky with the crescent of the moon overhead. In one beautiful image, the shadow of leaves veils a man’s head. Solomon and Terry formed a dee friendship after he picked him up as a hitchhiker going into town. “He sort of became like my confidant, my fixer, Solomon just knew everyone,” he says. “He’s this big, loud, bubbly, friendly guy that everyone kind of knew and loved.”

These contacts, connections and stories really only happen when you give a project time, says Terry. But it was his personal connection to the land that gives the work its beauty and depth. “My dad wanted to have his ashes scattered at Lake Kariba so that was the beginning of the seed that started the story because when I found that out there were a few more questions in terms of returning to the land, belonging to a place, and I guess specifically in terms of white Zimbabweans, I get the idea of returning to a land that we are originally not from. That struck me as quite powerful, but also problematic and quite complicated.”

They Still Owe Him a Boat is available now via contacting the artist at iamjonoterry.com

“People are shifting from owning physical products to living experiences, so we want to capture that”

“Travel photography has always been left to a commercial and not-so-artistic approach,” reflects Champenois, who joined Belmond in 2016. “Our concept is to work with very talented people to shape travel photography for the future… Now the magic is that we have photographers reaching out to us. There are very renowned photographers who want to work with us.”

Champenois and team worked on an exhibition alongside the first Belmond Legends project, commissioning four Mexican artists to photograph the Riviera Maya, Yucatán Peninsula, where Belmond’s Maroma hotel was to reopen. Belmond exhibited the resulting work by Patricia Lagarde, Javier Hinojosa, Ilán Rabchinskey and Margot Kalach at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2022; ZONAMACO, Mexico City, in February 2023; and Photo London in May 2023. Co-curated by the latter’s co-founder Fariba Farshad and Mexican gallerist Patricia Conde, Fotografía Maroma marked the start of an ongoing collaboration with Photo London, with Belmond a presenting partner of the fair every year since 2023, offering behind-the-scenes support as well as exhibiting its new commissions.

This year Belmond will also exhibit at Paris Photo, taking its own booth after co-presenting with RVB Books in 2024. “The idea is, how do we engage with the best people to support and leverage the work we’ve done with contemporary photographers?” says Champenois. “Art fairs are incredible platforms, but they expand beyond photography. I thought it was more interesting to work with our experience, with the right partners, with more specialised audiences.” 

More recently Champenois and his team – which includes Paris’ 20XX cultural agency – have expanded this work, launching the open-call Belmond Photographic Residency at Photo London in 2024. An annual competition aimed at emerging image-makers, the first iteration attracted more than 800 submissions, judged by photography heavyweights such as Simon Baker, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie; Carla Sozzani, former fashion editor and founder of Fondazione Sozzani; and the writers and curators Ekow Eshun and Antwaun Sargent. They selected Mexican artist Cecy Young as the winner, and Belmond invited her to stay for a month in Castello di Casole, a Medieval castle which is now a hotel, giving her €15,000, and setting up photography mentorships. Young’s resulting portfolio now joins the Belmond Legends series, and will be launched as a book by RVB at Paris Photo.

‘We may do an exhibition as well,” says Champenois. “Cecy is an emerging artist so it’s a great platform for her. The work is about her personal experience of the property and the region, meeting locals, going to local events, experiencing the land, the nature, the food. It’s very inspiring for travellers. People are shifting from owning physical products to living experiences, so we want to capture that, to show that lifestyle and how you’re going to live that experience when staying with us.”

Applications for this year’s residency are now closed but will open in Autumn of next year. Belmond’s other future plans include a commission around the Britannic Explorer, the new luxury sleeper train in England and Wales it announced in early July, 2026. The Explorer has three routes, into Cornwall, Wales and the Lake District, with a six-night journey from London to Cornwall or Wales costing £12,600, including meals prepared by chef Simon Rogan, and off-train experiences such as a trip to Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

As Champenois points out, Belmond has other photo-related activities. It publishes an annual in-house print magazine, Mondes, which champions travel photography as well as articles exploring Belmond’s slow-luxury ethos in a more editorial way than is possible in other brand channels. Belmond has also teamed up with cult Spanish magazine Apartamento to create a series of biannual cookbooks, titled Recipes and Wanderings, and publishes books with Assouline “more focussed on the history and heritage of our hotels”. Mondo, launched in 2024, is a newsletter pitched as Mondes’ digital sibling, while online Belmond Stories features selected articles from all of Belmond’s activities. In 2024 Belmond presented L’Observatoire carriage on its Venice Simplon-Orient-Express at the Venice Biennale, meanwhile, designed by artist and image-maker JR.

It is all part of a wider interest in communicating via cultural projects rather than ads or campaigns, a desire to speak about Belmond in terms of experiences rather than products. In this, Belmond is aligned with wider shifts in the luxury market, some of which have come from its stablemates; in 2018 the company was acquired by LVMH, the firm behind fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, and Champagne-makers such as Moët and Ruinart, which all have long histories in art patronage. The Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents goes on show at LUMA during Les Rencontres d’Arles, for example, while the Prix Maison Ruinart for emerging photographers is announced every year at Paris Photo.

“LVMH has 76 brands across the world, Belmond is one of the more recent acquisitions and one of the first lifestyle and travel brands,” reflects Champenois. “Previously LVMH was more focused on fashion and beauty, and alcohol, and I think everything started with fashion. When you work with fashion designers they have a very cultural approach – fashion designers are like artists, they work across many different fields. So culture has always been there, but it is true it has accelerated as a communication factor. For us it’s a way to convey something different to our guests, something that can be more personal. It’s a way to express our creativity and go beyond expected marketing.

“All the categories blend for people when they are travelling, they want to discover the local community, the artistic scene, the nature, all the terroirs,” he continues. “So I’m very interested in portraying destinations not only through our properties, but also what’s happening around them. Photography is the best way to capture that, to show all the experiences you can have when travelling with us. But it’s not direct marketing. It’s more about supporting art and culture to engage with communities and audiences.”

belmond.com, rvb-books.com

“Bring a print back to people. It’s the best way to open doors”

The images themselves resist easy reading. Miksys’ portraits, often taken with a flash in dim, smoke-thick interiors, show people posing with an intensity that feels both performative and private. “At first, I thought of posing as unnatural,” he admits. “But I realised those pictures were telling me a lot. They’re proud. They’re saying: this is who I am.”

The images are of a proud culture. Resisting patronisation, Miksys allows the community the space to represent themselves how they choose, such as the boxer Spartacus, with his fists up in a loose position, white vest and black bowler hat. “He’s from southern Lithuania and I photographed him in 2006 just before I published my first edition and then in 2019 I went and found him and photographed him again for the second edition.” 

Many images are also of domestic spaces and cultural artifacts, such as radios, wallpaper patterns or photo frames. Here unfurls an archive of a Soviet history that was falling apart around the Roma community. Fogged windows, plastic flowers, a coffee cup on a ledge, lace curtains bright with daylight. “Maybe they seem simple,” Miksys says, “but they have a lot of information about Soviet history, about how things look and feel here. The fog, the damp. It’s all part of it.” In one photograph, a single window glows with the warmth of a lived-in room. The image, he notes, was taken in Taboras, in a house that no longer exists. “People thought that neighbourhood was just a horrible place. But when you were inside, they’d invite you for coffee. They became my new community.”

The heart of BAXT lies in Taboras, a long-standing Roma settlement in Vilnius that once housed some 500 people. Over years of visits, Miksys watched the neighbourhood’s houses be torn down one by one. “The city was slowly demolishing it,” he explains. “Some of the homes just burned. I realised I had to continue documenting it, to have something, at least, as a record of what happened.” The last house was destroyed in 2020.

To preserve what could not be saved, Miksys began salvaging materials from the ruins – charred wooden beams, fragments of doors, children’s toys – and incorporating them into sculptural installations. “I had a solo exhibition at MO Museum in Vilnius,” he says. “We built these twelve doors with photographs on both sides, about what home means and what its destruction means.” The installations have since appeared in community spaces too, including a disused synagogue in Žagarė, the small town on the Latvian border where Miksys now lives.

This move from photography into sculpture reflects how BAXT has expanded in scope and intention. “I still feel there is a lot of the erasure of Roma culture and a limiting discussion about it especially with state institutions. I found that very frustrating and I felt I really had to make this document for the history books, at least to have a record of what happened.”

“With all my connections with the Roma community, we do everything together,” he says. “At the exhibitions, the openings, the closing parties, bands are playing, people are talking about everything. It’s important that they have that space.”

Representation – how and by whom it is made – has always been central to BAXT. In the beginning, Miksys spoke no Lithuanian, Russian, or Romani. Communication was mostly “sign language,” he laughs, or photographs themselves. “Larry Clark once told us, at school: photograph once, then bring a print back to people. It’s the best way to open doors.” The gesture proved crucial. “The Roma are a very oral culture,” Miksys explains. “Family history often survives only through photographs. So when I gave them pictures, they used them – put them in their homes, transformed them. Sometimes they’d even tear their page out of my book and hang it on the wall.”

Designed anew by Claudia Küssel in Düsseldorf, the book now adopts a vertical format and introduces unpublished photographs alongside essays and interviews with members of the Roma community. Its publication coincides with upcoming events, including one at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

The BAXT book launch will take place at the Photography’s Gallery on 06 November, 6:30 – 8:00. A talk will be followed by a book signing in the Bookshop, with copies of BAXT and a limited number of rare, out-of-print copies of DISKO available. 

“For me, I say that I keep people in good company because I’ve been doing this for so long that I have created a certain kind of company”

Her treatments have often been driven by intuition, curiosity and accessibility, but never really by longevity since the workbooks weren’t intended to be revisited – not even by her. “The books in a way represent how I live with my work,” she says of her use of everyday materials around her, like fax paper, which was “not meant to last”. It created an interesting tension between preservation and perishability: “For me, there was something quite intriguing about the fact that you have an image that can disappear.” 

Another material always within reach was herself, which explains the number of self-portraits in the book. “I wanted to have a character and the one that’s always around me is me,” she says. In this sense, I Will Keep You in Good Company behaves like a personal “time capsule”, too.

The diaristic nature of the book also comes through implicitly, particularly in the fragments of text layered into the photographs, ranging from functional captions to abstract annotations. Johnson Artur began creating the workbooks when she relocated to the UK, a move that transformed her relationship with words. “When I lived in Germany, I actually did a lot of writing, but I changed that when I came to London. I started to work much more through pictures,” she explains. “Language has always been there, but I’ve used it very differently to when I used to write. To me, language became a visual tool.” 

In the spirit of continual transformation, Johnson Artur was eager not to simply create a facsimile of her workbooks but to produce a new artefact, one that gives space for the images and sequencing to breathe. Some excerpts were chosen for their continued relevance, others simply because they stand out. Together, she hopes they unfold as an intuitive “visual narrative” rather than a specific storyline: “I wanted to make a book that somehow tells a certain story about what can happen to pictures when you have them close to you, and when you engage with them the way I’ve always engaged with my photographs.” 

This sense of intimacy also explains the book’s name, which is based on the response she once gave to someone she wanted to photograph who had asked what Johnson Artur – a film photographer – would later do with the picture. “A lot of what I do depends on people trusting me, giving me their picture. For me, I say that I keep people in good company because I’ve been doing this for so long that I have created a certain kind of company, because I put one person next to the other,” she explains. “I think the main focus for me is that each and every person has their presence there, but also that they, I hope, are fine together.”

 I Will Keep You in Good Company is now available at Self Publish Be Happy

Our Hidden Room is available here 

For Bejaoui and Douagi, Islam is “a powerful weapon against colonialism, capitalism, and supremacy, the way for global revolution. For centuries,” they tell me, “Islam has been targeted by various powers because they recognise the threat it poses to economic and political systems built on exploitation and oppression.”

At its core, Bejaoui and Douagi believe that Islam emphasises love, community, and divine justice. For many, it has been an anchor in the face of injustice, offering strength where systems fail. For Bejaoui and Douagi, Islam is not static but alive, “a powerful weapon against colonialism, capitalism, and supremacy,” they say, “the way for global revolution.”

They describe UMMAH as an ijtihad, an opening for diverse interpretations of faith that resists the flattening gaze of Western frameworks. “We deliberately avoided aligning with dominant Western or white-centric narratives,” they explain, “especially regarding queerness or identity politics that often try to govern and instrumentalise our experiences. We refuse to be reduced to frameworks that serve colonial agendas, or to have our identities co-opted for others’ purposes.” Instead, the book grounds itself in the Global South and reflects the lived, nuanced realities of Muslim communities across the world.

The aim was never to represent Islam in its entirety, but to hold space for its plurality. “Islam is as plural as the people who live it, love it, and carry it in their hearts,” they tell me. Each contribution reflects a particular encounter with the dunya – shaped by history, culture, migration, and personal spirituality – together forming a chorus that resists any singular representation.

Funding was one of the hardest challenges. In the West, Islam is still seen as “too risky” or “too radical,” which makes projects like this nearly impossible to sustain. “This reflects a wider societal issue,” the duo note, “the persistent fear and misunderstanding surrounding Islam.” Pre-orders have become the main way to cover costs, a reminder of how often Muslim artists and communities are forced to support themselves when institutions turn away.

But what might have been a limitation also became the book’s strength. The open call expanded the conversation far beyond their immediate networks, drawing in people they may never have reached otherwise. “It was inspiring to witness how people reclaimed Islam with pride and joy,” Douagi and Bejaoui recall. “The solidarity it generated showed us the beauty of shared struggle and hope. It reminded us that faith is alive, dynamic, and can be a source of strength and healing in difficult times.”

Collaboration shaped not just the content but the look and feel of the book. Working with Marie-Mam Sai Belier and Moustafa Kridly, close friends and long-time collaborators, the design process was playful and deeply communal. “We shared ideas, inspirations, and had a lot of fun crafting the visual identity,” they say. The bold typographic treatment became the review’s visual signature – another refusal of standardisation.

UMMAH is only the beginning. Uncivilized Collective’s first standalone book, République Indépendante des Immigré.e.s de Marseille, is a portrait of the city told through the voices of its immigrant communities. A mosaic of stories, poems, and fragments, it speaks frankly of Marseille’s contradictions: its beauty, its poverty, its unyielding vitality. The launch will unfold in the city itself with live performances, turning the book into a communal event.

This September comes Crash System: Decolonial Arcade, where the act of play becomes a political tool. Through works by Issam Smiri, Kmar Douagi, and Rayane Jemaa, the exhibition dismantles the colonial mechanics embedded in mainstream video games. Jemaa’s Is This the Middle East? dissects stereotypes of the region, Smiri’s Syncretisme invites players to co-create stories, and a new collaborative game designed by Smiri and produced by Bejaoui incorporates handmade objects as integral components. Here, gaming becomes both imaginative resistance and care.

Looking further ahead, a new collective volume provisionally titled Spiritual Politics will take shape under the direction of Musa Shadeedi. Beginning from the premise that the public realm is never neutral, it draws on Islamic spiritual traditions, among others, to ask how belief can inform governance, ethics, and resistance. Contributions will explore themes such as ethical disobedience, ecological responsibility, and the metaphysics of liberation, with an open call due later this year.

Uncivilized Review Issue 0: UMMAH: Divine Oneness, Worship Plurality is available for pre-order now

At its core, everything stems from the collective desire to imagine and demand a freer world – even though we understand that the idea of freedom today is blurred and often co-opted by the very system that oppresses us. Faced with that, documenting our stories is not just about memory: it is also a radical way of affirming our existence and sustaining the hope for transformation.

DA: What has changed about Issue 11 from other issues?

LJ: Everything has changed. Each edition of Balam is always conceived from scratch. The only thing that remains the same is the physical format of the magazine. I often say that the project can’t be linear nor straight, because those of us behind it are queer, politically incorrect people who don’t follow a straight or normative logic. This allows us to step in and out and to propose what feels most coherent based on the materials and stories we gather.

What makes Issue 11 particularly unique is that we brought to the centre something that had previously been more implicit: the archive. Throughout Balam’s history, we have always worked with archives, but in this edition, we decided to do so explicitly – highlighting queer archives as living documents created and cared for by their own protagonists. These archives not only record; they also claim a place of power and autonomy in the face of academic and official narratives that have historically silenced or distorted us.

This issue reflects on crystallisation as an essential act to document our passage through time, but it also questions the romanticisation of the idea of archiving and challenges the notion that there’s a single formula for how it should be done. These archives arise not from an institutional or pedagogical mandate but from a vital need to come together and exist.

“My process has a lot to do with asking why we were never shown or told about things in a certain way. Morality plays a big role in understanding why some topics were left out of dominant narratives”

I believe this edition also mirrors my own practice as an editor and curator: a practice that doesn’t follow established formulas for how a magazine should be made but instead seeks to create spaces that resist the appropriation and extractivism of our realities. Rather than aiming to teach, we accompany and amplify voices and stories that have historically been marginalised.

DA: Tell me about the practical difficulties of publishing Balam; what obstacles are you facing?

LJ: It’s very complex. This year marks Balam’s tenth anniversary, and keeping the project alive for so long has meant investing an enormous amount of physical, emotional, and creative energy, while still struggling to achieve the stability we’ve never quite reached. Printing in Argentina has become increasingly expensive. Over the years, we’ve watched many independent publishing projects become obsolete or simply disappear because they can’t sustain themselves financially. This forces us to constantly rethink our strategies to stay afloat. That’s why it’s so important to build alliances with colleagues and other projects that can give us space and help us expand our reach.

The project usually survives thanks to cultural grants and long-term support from our audience. However, this year, due to the current political climate, we didn’t receive the grant that historically helped cover a significant part of the costs, and sales have also dropped considerably. On top of that, contemporary photography projects in Argentina – especially those with a queer perspective – are often pushed aside. There are no cultural policies or institutional support structures that truly understand the value of what we’re doing. Photography in Argentina remains largely white and centralised, and Balam is a critical response to that reality.

Every new issue is produced without knowing whether we’ll be able to publish the next one. We work issue by issue, making a huge financial, emotional, and mental investment each time. It’s a big risk, and we’re also working with a kind of photography that unsettles, that challenges, and that doesn’t align with hegemonic values, which makes it even harder to get support from large institutions or traditional funding bodies. Yet that same difficulty also reinforces the political meaning of the project: insisting on existing, creating, and trying to be there in time to give space and visibility to colleagues and artists who, perhaps, might not be able to be present tomorrow.

DA: Is there a place you started your visual research, and what is your general research process? How are you finding images?

LJ: My training has been – and for now still is – self-taught. In reality, it’s guided by a very clear driving force: working with what isn’t part of the “official” history. Photography becomes an excuse to gather and make visible works that resonate within that marginalised or displaced visual imaginary. But beyond the aesthetic, what interests me is the social act this can provoke within the art field and my community.

My research starts from the many threads that shape the way we feel in community. It always begins with something personal, but with the intention of turning it into something collective. When that happens, it expands enormously, allowing me to bring together works and archives that speak to each other and acquire shared meaning.

My process has a lot to do with asking why we were never shown or told about things in a certain way. Morality plays a big role in understanding why some topics were left out of dominant narratives.

That’s how I find these images: scattered, hidden, or fragmented. And I think it’s important that they keep some of that dispersed or fragmented nature, because that’s where their power and essence lie. Keeping them partially outside the hegemonic order or the public allows them to remain provocative gestures – something that invites discovery, questioning, and the opening of new conversations.

DA: Finally, tell us why you wanted to create the Nan Goldin zine insert.

LJ: My declaration of love and admiration for Nan Goldin has been one of the fundamental reasons I work in photography. For me, she will always feel close to the South – a figure whose work resonates deeply here – and this issue felt like the perfect moment to invite her to collaborate. Goldin has inspired many of us who work with images from outside the centres of power, and collaborating with her is something I never imagined possible coming from Latin America.

What makes this special is that, for the first time, we contextualise Goldin’s work from a Latin American perspective – placing it in conversation with a trans archive. We paired her series The Other Side with photographs from the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT). In doing so, we discovered strong parallels: both bodies of work capture lives shaped by marginalisation but do so with striking authenticity and intimacy.

This dialogue challenges conventional ideas of authorship and photographic practice, highlighting images created by the trans women themselves – people who didn’t see themselves as photographers, yet documented their realities with raw honesty. It opens new ways to think about photography and the power of archives, questioning who gets to tell these stories and reminding us of the importance of preserving these voices from the margins.

Balam No 11: Radical is now available for pre-order.

“There’s this huge Black community, and a lot of people follow us due to that fact. Because they’re like, ‘OK! Everything Blackness, we can get from this page”

“Initially I was doing mostly West Africa,” says Patrick via video call. “Then later I was like, ‘Damn! Uganda looks really nice – and Zambia and Namibia also’. So I said, ‘OK, now we include East, West, North Africa, actually everybody in Africa definitely deserves to be spoken about’. And later I’d see some events and I’d think, ‘Yo, what the hell is this? It’s European!’. So I decided, let’s create an international issue, where we can just speak to anybody.”

Each issue also includes stories on fashion brands, often international and interesting in their own right. Issue 4 includes a shoot for J-Sabelo, for example, a Zimbabwean- German label. “The brand was honestly born out of a personal necessity to adorn my culture in spaces, far from home, where I felt a crisis of identity, a pure longing for home,” reads a quote from the founder, Aristide Loua. “To me, clothing does reflect one’s particular background, set of emotions, idea of the world, or even reinvention of such. And ever since coming back home, in late December 2015, after a decade living abroad, I have been on constant research, a discovery of excellence in the craftsmanship our local artisans are able to put forth.”

Random Photo Journal’s team is international in scope too, with Patrick based in Nigeria and creative director Justyna Obasi based in Nigeria and Germany; they also take frequent trips to Cape Town. Patrick grew up in Lagos, before moving to Ghana at 13; he studied business administration in Accra, returning to Lagos when he was 26. By then he was a keen photographer, and after a road trip around Nigeria, taking images on the way, launched Random Photo Journal as a vehicle for his own work. 

Then Covid hit, and other people’s photography became a way to see and hear about the world. “I couldn’t travel, I couldn’t photograph any place anymore,” says Patrick. “So I was forced to rely on other people in the places I would love to be at. I just resorted to, ‘OK, so I can’t come to Tanzania right now, but please can I talk to you about Tanzania, and please, can I see some of your images so I can have an idea of what it’s like?”

After lockdown he intended to go back to showing his own work but, having interviewed so many interesting people, and gathered so many stories, found Random Photo Journal had taken on a life of its own. It has been a learning curve, he concedes – he has made issues that lacked barcodes, or information on the spine (making them hard to distribute). But he is also part of a thriving scene and, with fairs such as Lagos Art Book springing up and over 31,000 Instagram followers, the magazine now usually sells out.

“There’s this huge Black community, right?” says Patrick. “And a lot of people follow due to that fact. Because they’re like, ‘OK! Everything Blackness, we can get from this page’.”

@randomphotographyjournal

The book’s design is simple, as are the poetic images. There is relief in this approach; where one might have opted to heighten the layout or design to contrast the photography, this straightforwardness allows Gragossian’s images to speak for themselves. 

And these landscapes really do seem to be speaking to us. They marry the natural environments with the built, showing dilapidated buildings being overtaken by ivy or surrounded by overgrowth; other ruined and abandoned places are completely bereft of nature. These views offer a stark contrast to the La La Land depiction of Los Angeles we are more used to seeing in mainstream media. 

On first glance, the images are empty of people or politics, but of course, there are subtle signs which suggest otherwise. These spaces tell us about what kind of people inhabit this city, how they shape this city, who governs this city. One photo shows a rudimentary ‘FOR SALE’ sign laying on its side framed by the American flag. Many images, such as a broken old gate hanging off its hinges bordering a beautiful mansion, feel tongue-in-cheek. 

There is a world humming above these places that offer illusion – the glitz and glamour and romance we find in vintage Hollywood films – but quite literally underneath these surfaces are places fewer of us see, but more of what truer, local Angelenos encounter.

North North South is available for pre-order and will ship July 2025.

@ayda_gragossian