COVER STORIES
Latest on ZERO.NINE
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 after runaway success. 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. We met with Alana during a live event organised by Romancero Books.
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. Through repeated visual elements, she highlights the cyclical nature of human behaviour, the illusion of choice, and the constant tension between how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mi Faddi
Mi Faddi by photographer Aisha Hanan Buhari is a poignant series of conceptual portraits featuring her siblings. Exploring themes of protection, family and privacy, the work reflects the challenges of living in the public eye. Rare nautilus shells are physically placed on top of the images, symbolically shielding the subjects and emphasising their preciousness in both personal and universal contexts.
Liminal Spaces
In her series, Katherine Flynn explores the beauty of liminal space—those transitional states found in abandoned landscapes and within ourselves. Working from a desert junkyard turned creative lab, she repurposes found VW mirrors and doors to frame her images, transforming discarded objects into vessels of memory, stillness, and reflection.
From the Shadows
The return of The Horrors feels nothing short of a rebirth. Twenty years after they first emerged on London’s fringes, the band unleashed their sixth studio album, Night Life, last March—and promptly embarked on their first full-scale tour in nearly a decade. From intimate basement gigs to sold-out theatres from Madrid to Manchester, frontman Faris Badwan and bassist Rhys “Spider” Webb sat down with us to reflect on sleepless walks, political urgency and the creative alchemy that has kept them vital two decades in.
In case you missed it
Baltic ATM: Breaking Barriers
Baltic ATM, the annual programme from North London’s Baltic Studios, supports eight emerging musicians with pro-grade recording tools, mentoring, and industry connections. The 2025 edition just ended, and we talked to studio founder Orlando Leopard and all eight artists to find out why initiatives like these are so important for young musicians.
People Watching: Pretzel Cage
With the launch of his new photo studio in Hackney Downs, portrait artist Matt Ford introduces People Watching—an ongoing series of short video portraits featuring the individuals he photographs in the space. We are proud to present the first film featuring performance artist Pretzel Cage.
Paradise
Paradise by Gian Marco Sanna is a haunting visual reflection on humanity's estrangement from nature. Through stark imagery and silence, the project explores our descent from harmony to destruction, questioning freedom, consumerism, and the illusion of progress as we drift further from the origins that once defined our existence.