Fashion photography is shifting. A new generation is dismantling old hierarchies, centring overlooked beauty and beautifully demonstrating that images can be both commercially successful and politically urgent. Our Culture recommends five photographers to watch as they redefine the craft in 2026:
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Szilveszter Makó
Szilveszter Makó orchestrates photographs that feel like they’ve slipped through time. Blending Renaissance chiaroscuro, Dadaist absurdism and the tactile intimacy of handmade sets, the Hungarian-born, Milan-based photographer crafts portraits that lend everyone he shoots a dimension rarely seen in contemporary image-making.
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Nadine Ijewere
Nadine Ijewere commands attention through colour and composure. Her fashion and portrait work often features women with unsmiling intensity and sculptural precision, and bodies arranged in striking geometric forms. She doesn’t ask her subjects to charm or seduce; instead, she photographs them with dignified seriousness, evoking a quietly revolutionary quality.
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Han Yang
Han Yang weaves posthumanist philosophy and feminist theory into fashion imagery that feels like entering another dimension. Her work dismantles the boundary between body and environment, human and object, creating surreal tableaux where figures merge with nonhuman animals and organic matter. It’s fashion photography that thinks deeply about what bodies mean and could become.
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Rafael Pavarotti
Rafael Pavarotti’s work breathes boldness: in color, composition and emotional intensity that pours through each image. The Brazilian photographer creates fashion imagery that doesn’t just ask for space — it claims it, addressing the industry’s long history of marginalising Black subjects through unapologetic presence.
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Hannah Hall
Hannah Hall’s photography lures you in with warmth, then unsettles. Her images are soft in their colours and unique characters, yet boldly reject the male gaze and stifling rules of our societal playground. Through projects like “I never wanted to sell you a fantasy,” she explores the complexities of motherhood and queerness, and the contradictions that live beneath what we show the world.
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