When George Pitts died earlier this year, Vice photo editor Elizabeth Renstrom was struck by how much he had influenced her work and her approach to photography. Deciding the theme for this year’s photo issue seemed a natural progression: Idols. The issue presents up-and-coming photographers alongside the more established names that have made a big impact on their craft.
The September issue brings the otherwise invisible into sharp focus. Invisible World explores forgotten conflicts, intimate retreats, abused landscapes and remote islands to uncover the hidden realities and unknown societies behind ordinary backdrops. “As social beings, we all demand to be seen,” says Hoda Afshar, whose latest series, Behold, takes us to an exclusive male-only bathhouse. Her point resonates with all the photoseries explored in this issue: how do we negotiate our surroundings, how do we see our societies, how do we interpret our world? We need to first see the invisible to answer these ever salient questions.
Arriving in London from Tehran, aged 10, and not having English as a first language,…
Having assisted Wolfgang Tillmans for a year after studying photography at Kingston University, Carmen Brunner…
