All images © Sandra Blow
Every year, BJP publishes its Ones to Watch issue – our selection of the artists who epitomise the talent and creativity in international photography today, as nominated by a global network of curators, editors, and artists. As we finalise this year’s list, to be published in Issue 7926 this June, we’re revisiting the 2025 Ones to Watch. Today, Sandra Blow, as nominated by Anna Planas
Sandra Blow was born in 1990 in Atizapán de Zaragoza, a municipality in the north-west of the State of Mexico, not far from Mexico City and highly influenced by a middle-class American lifestyle. Growing up, Blow was drawn to the visual language of fashion magazines, yet did not recognise herself in them. “Society is very accustomed to seeing only one or two types of beauty, but it must be accepted that there are many,” she reflects. “Beauty exists in Black bodies, in fat bodies, in mutilated bodies, in tall bodies, in thin bodies – all bodies.”
During her undergraduate studies in advertising, she took a photography course; her teacher saw potential and encouraged her to keep making images. Blow did not let it go. She dreamed of becoming a fashion photographer published in outlets such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and gained experience shooting fashion and editorial photography for Mexican magazines.
At 22, Blow moved to Mexico City and found a community with whom she identified – the queer movement. Becoming part of it exposed her to ideas such as body positivity, classism, racism, gender ideologies, and much more. She decided to turn her camera on this community, and began to document the queer nightlife scene, a time-bound space that allows its participants to experience freedom. “What maybe sets my work apart is that I stopped looking for the perfection I seek in my fashion photographs,” she says. “I said, ‘This world that I am portraying is an underground world, a world of drugs, a world of sex… It is the underworld. If I am going to portray the underworld, well, I am not going to decorate it. I’m going to show things as they are’.”
“What I want to represent is free sexuality. Let everyone live their sexuality as they want.” Sandra Blow
Blow’s images are raw and intimate, made without pre-production plans; her subjects are primarily women, in all their various expressions. She is particularly fond of drag queens, who she considers the epitome of liberation; she is in awe of their talent for dressing up, she says, performing in front of an audience, regardless of how their daily lives might make them feel. In her images they gleam, they glare, and they radiate joie de vivre.
Interested in registering uniqueness, Blow foregrounds individuals’ style and personal choices by honing in on tattoos, flamboyant jewellery, bold makeup, sparkly sequin attire and vertiginous high heels. A self-identified gothic punk, with a love of glossy clothing, she focuses on dissidence and resistance. “Fashion and accessories have always been a weapon,” she says. “These are elements that we use to empower ourselves.”
Blow’s images also embrace explicitly erotic gestures and symbols, including seductive lingerie, sheer clothing and suggestive dance moves. For her, they are responses to the prudish, heteronormative despotism endured throughout history by women and LGBTQ+ people, forcing them to conceal their lusts and desires from social scrutiny. While sex has long been a social taboo, for these communities it has been revolutionary. “My work is very sexual, but it doesn’t mean that I am selling sex or promoting sex,” she explains. “What I want to represent is free sexuality. Let everyone live their sexuality as they want.”
Blow prefers to use a 35mm film camera, although she always carries a digital backup too, and her work can vary from the clinically precise, to the dreamlike, atmospheric and grainy. The intensity of light – or its absence – adds an eerie quality, beckoning the future nostalgia of a marginalised community, a destiny of boundless possibilities. In fact, Blow’s photographs do more than document a community in a moment in time and place – they also help create that community. She hopes that they will inform and inspire queer generations to come.
“Gays, trans, bis, queers, everyone, we have always existed and we’re not going anywhere,” she says. “We exist because we resist. I consider it my mission to show that resistance, that strength, that beauty, because it is also a beautiful world. When I am no longer here, I would love to leave this archive organised and ideally inspiring someone else to continue.”
Blow was nominated for Ones to Watch by Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo. “Sandra Blow’s images are brimming with joy and sincerity,” she explains. “Through an impressive archive of photographs of the Mexican night, she depicts the queer and LGBTQ+ community with a strong, present and up-to-date eye.”
