I’d love there to be some crisp through-line that tidily unites this collection of ten photo stories. In addition to them being (in no particular order) among the most popular photo stories we’ve published this year on Dazed, I’d love to be able to trace some very legible thematic thread between each extraordinary project and conclude neatly; to tie up all the loose ends and present them in a way that concisely reflects 2024 back to us so we can get hold of it, make it manageable. But, brought together, it’s an ungraspable constellation of disparate ideas – trying to impose order onto this tangle doesn’t do justice to the nuance, ambiguity and mystery contained within.

From the charismatic young artists of Germany’s new new wave scene to the allure of Parisian “mysterious nocturnal streets”, recovering from heartbreak in New York, goths gathering in a small northern coastal town, and Catholic schoolgirls’ small acts of defiance, these photographers are exploring very different worlds. If you allow them to work their magic on you, configurations and patterns begin to present themselves; an uncertain rhythm begins to form. You might say that these photographers are all using their cameras to investigate the world within and without. You could say that they’re all telling stories. You could say that there are elements of self-exploration (but it would be lazy – you could say that about most, if not, all art at a push). I prefer to leave it as a brilliant, incongruous mess of love, anguish, romance, lust, self-revelation, friendship and so much more. Enjoy. 

SAM PENN, BAD BEHAVIOUR

Inspired by Mary Gaitskill’s romantic, brutal, provocative and poetic short story collection of the same name, Sam Penn’s exhibition and zine Bad Behaviour is a compelling and personal series of portraits, landscapes and close-up shots of bodies. Saturated in the heady atmosphere of New York and shot in the aftermath of a painful heartbreak, they evoke the vivid flashes of memory and lucid fragments of recall of Gaitskill’s prose.  

“The short stories were well suited to my attention span,” Penn told Dazed. “The pace of my life was volatile; everything felt fragmented and quick, I found the characters in Bad Behavior entangled in each other’s suffering, dealing with heartbreak, addiction, and disappointment; what happens when a relationship doesn’t live up to expectation or fantasy. The stories felt like a reflection of my own life, and the work I was trying to make out of it.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

MARINA MÓNACO, I SAW YOU IN A SONG

Argentina-born photographer Marina Mónaco’s portraits offer a romantic, cinematic portrayal of a picaresque world of young friends, lovers, artists and bandmates against the backdrop of the contemporary German new wave scene, Neue Neue Deutsche Welle. 

Contemplating her outsider’s perspective of the city, she says, “Born here, I wouldn’t have been able to see it this way, not even in the former new wave scene.” Without speaking the same language or understanding the lyrics to the songs she was falling in love with, she became close to the artists on the scene, and this distance became a vital component of her work.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

MARIE TOMANOVA, LOST AND FOUND

Known for her portraits of New York’s emerging youth culture, photographer Marie Tomanova turned the camera on herself with the intention of taking a self-portrait every day for a year. The project became Lost and Found – a series of 344 Polaroids (the missing 21 are accounted for by three weeks in July). “Rather than being a failure, those empty weeks – that missing work – became something greater. Those missing weeks stand in for all that cannot be seen or understood. They stand in for the photos that are not shown, the moments behind the camera that cannot be seen, the life and depth of self that is not captured on film,” Tomanova told Dazed. 

What remains is an unflinching, ceaselessly inventive and conceptually ambitious sequence of self-portraits. For Tomanova, Lost and Found is deeply personal. Having encountered sexism as a student at art school, the exhibition reflects a journey from uncertainty to self-realisation. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

PARIS PHOTO, PARCOURS DE JIM JARMUSCH

“As a restless teenager, surrealism was a revelation to me, first in its visual forms and then its literary ones,” Jim Jarmusch told Dazed earlier this year. Ahead of November’s Paris Photo, the legendary filmmaker curated a personal selection of artworks in celebration of “this defiant and joyful artistic disruption” on its 100th anniversary. 

“In my early twenties, [surrrealism] first drew me to Paris, where I repeatedly used Breton’s Nadja as a kind of walking map through the mysterious nocturnal streets of the city,” he recalled. While his selections for the 2024 edition of Paris Photo – which include work by David Hockney, Peter Hujar, Lisetta Carmi, Daidō Moriyama and Zanele Muholi – aren’t purely from the surrealism canon, the chosen images “reflect its tenets of the transformation of the ordinary into the dreamlike, and at times vice-versa”.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

BRIANNA CAPOZZI, SISTERS

Brianna Capozzi’s Sisters (published by IDEA) is a loving and intimate exploration of the complex and often intense bond between sisters. Here, the acclaimed New York fashion photographer eschews the flawless perfection of fashion imagery for a tender and unselfconscious vision of real bodies and real human connection. The sisters, twins, and half-sisters in these portraits are nude or wearing minimal clothing, and stretch marks, baby bumps are left exposed in all their glory, creating a sense of intense intimacy.

“As I shot each early set of sisters, I noticed the nuance and difference from friendships. There were wider age gaps, more likeness in appearance and mannerisms, but also less likeness in other ways. You choose your friends, and often you live similar lives to them. [With sisters], guards were down fully in this very natural way,” Capozzi told Dazed. “It showed me a lot of beauty in all the different kinds of dynamics I got to witness, and that closeness can last a lifetime. It also emphasised that not all sisters are so lucky, some struggle with jealousy, others become estranged.” 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

GEORGE HUTTON, WHITBY GOTH WEEKEND 

The enduring and widespread appeal of the gothic is characterised in George Hutton’s loving and humorous portrayal of Whitby Goth Weekend – a bi-annual gathering of goths of all ages and from all walks of life. Drawn to the quaint harbour town for its connection to Dracula (Bram Stoker took inspiration from his visit here, making it a principal location in his novel), goths flock to Whitby twice a year to wander the little streets in their regalia and eat fish and chips beneath the striking silhouette of Whitby’s clifftop ruined abbey.

“It’s a pretty surreal weekend, Whitby is a traditional seaside town; it is very picturesque, and nothing out of the ordinary really happens. Then, twice a year for three days, it becomes a home for the goth community. People travel from all over the country, and some even travel internationally to come to this quiet and small town,” he recalled in a recent conversation with Dazed. “It began 30 years ago when a small group of goths decided to meet up in Whitby, the home of Dracula. At first, the Elsinore Pub was the only pub that openly accepted and hosted them. Now, three decades on, the whole town welcomes goths from every walk of life. For me, this is the heart of the festival: creating a place where a group of friends could meet and, for one weekend, come together and celebrate their individuality.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

NAN GOLDIN, YOU NEVER DID ANYTHING WRONG

Nan Goldin’s recent exhibition presented a wildly-anticipated body of new work from the revered artist. Made up of two film works and a range of new photographs, You never did anything wrong, at Gagosian in New York, featured a new series, The Stendhal Syndrome – a project juxtaposing juxtaposed portraits of her close friends and family with photos of classical, renaissance, and baroque masterpieces taken over the years by Goldin in the likes of the Louvre, the Met, and the Prado. Side by side, the photographs provoked questions about art world hierarchies while alighting on the touchstone themes of the artist’s beloved canon – beauty, loss, relationships and love. 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

ANDREA MODICA, CATHOLIC GIRL

High school is a fraught time. Revisiting her alma mata – a predominantly Italian-American Catholic school for girls in Brooklyn – brought back some powerful and stirring recollections for photographer Andrea Modica. “I was exactly seven years out of high school, in the middle of graduate school,” the photographer recalled, speaking to Dazed from Philadelphia earlier this year. “I returned to all those emotions of being in high school. In retrospect, seven years is a tiny amount of time and I was still so close to it.” Inspired by her vivid memories of high school, she began taking portraits of the students and, four decades later, the pictures have been assembled into a monograph, Catholic Girl (published by L’Artiere Edizioni). 

From pairs of best friends to lone schoolgirls, Modica’s portraits capture an enduring spirit of rebellion, embodied in the details – the make-up, accessories and individual alterations of the regulation Catholic school uniform. One pair in particular proved especially striking to Modica: two sisters, the younger with her lips painted black, startling eyeliner and, a thick chain circling her neck. “She’s still wearing the uniform, following the rules, but she’s got those things going on – that hadn't changed; we had always figured out ways to not get into too much trouble, but still be enough of a pain to the nuns,” shares Modica. By contrast, her elder sister sits beatifically with a crucifix dangling from her ear. “I love that the younger sister is the rebel, that the bigger sister’s not wearing much make-up, and yet they’re sisters, they’re together. It’s beautiful.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

GIULIA BERSANI, SELF PORTRAITS

Since her first forays into image-making, Milan-born photographer Giulia Bersani ​has been taking self-portraits. While the practice began as a convenient way to take pictures – she was the only model constantly available – she began to realise these “precious documents” functioned as a way to explore her psyche and her shifting, evolving sense of self. “I think self-portraits have an extra value since the presence and essence of the artist is double,” she told Dazed earlier this year. 

Powerfully raw and vulnerable, they speak of what it means to inhabit a body. Taken over a 13 year period, the photographs – spontaneous, unstaged – radiate a kind of disarming honesty. “You can see my insecurities, my melancholy, my fears, but also the house of my parents where I grew up, my love stories, the story of my body,”  Bersani told Dazed. “It feels good, it doesn’t scare me. I love transparency and I think those pictures are simple and true enough not to be misunderstood. It’s about self-representation. Since it’s my own vision about myself (as a woman), it’s precious.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

SOFIYA LORIASHVILI, MY BOOK 

Since 2017, 25-year-old photographer Sofiya Loriashvili has been assembling an archive of pictures recording her world. Her monograph My Book is a collection of images that chronicle and elucidate some of her life during the recent turbulent years. From the chaos of addiction and hospitalisation, to the euphoria of Parisian nightlife, Loriashvili’s camera became her constant companion.

“I began carrying a camera everywhere I went, driven by an obsession to document everything that caught my eye. With my camera, I could see things more clearly,” she told Dazed. Taking pictures was a way of explicating her experiences. “I like having a detective’s eye… rummaging through people’s mess, discovering others’ apartments, and looking down at the ground… Trash cans, crushed animals, period blood, the way clothes take shape when we take them off and leave them on the floor. Even though I photograph people a lot, what truly obsesses me is everything that surrounds them – all the objects that make them who they are.” Having chronicled the chaotic details and the “friendship, parties, addiction, death and love”, a vast, complex vision of a life emerges.

Read the full story here on Dazed.