In the spring, we went to Ukraine to hang out with the teenage goths coming of age in a war zone. In the summer, we provided a blast of contrarian optimism for a world that seems to hate itself, with The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue. This fall, we teamed up with Deftones, a band who have warped conventional ideas about physics by somehow getting cooler every year since their inception, for an issue unlike anything VICE has done before.

And this winter, we have something incredibly special coming your way, a Big Idea issue full of funny-as-fuck stuff, profound writing about the state of the modern world, reportage from some of the most violent places on Earth, and images that will pierce your psyche before setting up home there forever.

To celebrate, we are giving you a 25 percent discount on an annual subscription to our beautiful magazine. All you gotta do is use the code SUB25 at checkout.

With the subscription, you also get access to all of the great work behind our paywall—including exclusive new VICE documentaries, provocative columnists, and soon a new members-only Discord—and you also get to kill all of the ads on VICE.com.

Do it. You won’t regret it. And even if you do, you can email us complaining and we’ll print it in our letters page.

The post Move Fast, and Get 25% Off a VICE Magazine Subscription appeared first on VICE.

It can seem these days as though people are desperate to define themselves by the thing that makes them most miserable. Whether they’re French farmers spraying liquid manure over local council buildings, civic nationalists fretting about shoplifting while the world burns, or Nerd Reich dweebs raging against the profane insult of being born human, it feels like we have all internalized sadness and anxiety to such a degree that even if there were any joy left in the world, chances are we wouldn’t be able to sniff it out.

Doing what everyone else does, saying what everyone else says, and thinking what everyone else thinks are three of the most boring things you can do. So, for the summer installment of the recently resurrected VICE magazine, we leant into our contrarian instincts and wound up in a surprisingly happy place—The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue is out now, on shop shelves and in the hands of our subscribers, and it might just change your depressing life forever.

In it, you’ll find a bounty of emotional buoyancy aids to keep you afloat in a stormy world. Such as: a brand new type of ecstasy, with way more high and a lot less of the low. A somewhat radical idea for fighting climate change that involves nuking the Earth’s crust. Heartening photographic proof that teenage rave kids are still winding up police, a rebuke to the idea that Gen Z hate sex, and a delightful Jamie Lee Taete fashion shoot with Princess Diana, the Prophet Abraham, and other A-list talent both living and dead.

There’s a ton of photos so good you’d pay big money on the black market to get your hands on the TIFFs, including a report from Rana Pandey on an Indian death party in West Bengal, where revelers raid infant graves and dance at dawn with corpses and skulls to prove that even when it comes, your final breath is just a part of existence that paves the way for new life. When you get your head around the hygiene issues, it’s a compelling argument.

We have an uplifting opening letter from Shanghai, where Dean Kissick was busy seeking reasons for cheer, a punchy letters page, and a radical argument that perhaps the internet *isn’t* destroying us, as well as an intoxicating 14-page photo report from the last strip club left standing in Miami Beach. And if none of that works magic on your mood, seek solace in Michael Holden‘s Seven Mental Coping Strategies for the End of the World, or schadenfreude in the strife of a Japanese man named Toco who spent thousands turning himself into a dog but whose zoo for other human dogs is rumored to have hit the skids. Poor Toco!

For more of a lowdown on the issue, read A Letter From the Editor (i.e. me) right here.

You can find The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue at Barnes & Noble stores in the U.S. now. A subscription saves you the journey: for just $70 a year, you’ll get four issues of VICE magazine, delivered right to your door. Membership options below.

What You’ll Get and What It Costs

For $70 per year, you can get our full-works print and digital membership—you’ll receive all 4 print issues of the magazine per year straight to your door, as well as exclusive access to the paywalled Members Only section of VICE.com.

While print is back, that doesn’t mean we’re leaving the internet behind. With a digital membership, you can jump the paywall into our Members Only Section, where you’ll get exclusive early access to brand new VICE documentaries before they’re streaming anywhere else, as well as members-only content from our best writers and columnists.

If, for some reason, you don’t want the magazine, you can get an annual digital-only membership for $20 a year—or $2 per month, if you’d rather do it that way.

The cash we raise through this will be funneled straight back into making more great video and written editorial for you to gorge yourselves silly upon. It’s a virtuous cycle, insert yourself into it by browsing the various membership options below.

Shortly after signing up for the print subscription, you will receive an email asking you to confirm your shipping address. By signing up you agree to our privacy policy, terms and conditions, and our fulfilment policy.

WHAT’S INCLUDED IN THE PRINT & DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION?

• 4 x issues of VICE magazine, one arriving at your doorstep every quarter
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• Our paywalled Members Only section, featuring exclusive features and columns

PRICE: $70 PER YEAR

WHAT’S INCLUDED IN THE DIGITAL-ONLY SUBSCRIPTION?

• Exclusive access to an all-new VICE documentaries
• Our paywalled Members Only section, featuring exclusive features and columns

PRICE: $20 PER YEAR or $2 PER MONTH

WHAT NEXT?

• The print & digital subscription includes access to 4 magazines a year, while the digital only subscription includes online access to exclusive films and articles
• By signing up you agree to our privacy policy (here), terms and conditions (here) and our fulfillment policy (here)
• The magazine will be shipped internationally. Please get in touch if you have any queries related to shipping

Contact membersupport@vice.com with any questions related to the subscription

The post VICE Magazine Is Back—Get the Latest Issue appeared first on VICE.

2025 sees the glorious return of VICE magazine to print, marking a new golden era of weird and wonderful reportage in a totally messed-up world.

For the first time in six years, an elite team of our greatest writers and photographers has been gathered together in 120 pages that you can hold in your hands, smell with your nose, tear into tiny pieces, and frame on your living room wall. But like everything else in modern life, if you want it to exist, you have to pay for it. Don’t blame us, blame market forces!

The year began with The Rock Bottom Issue, and 2025’s second installment—The Reasons To Be Cheerful Issue—is currently landing on the doorsteps of our paying members. The third, an historic issue in the pantheon of VICE magazine, is just around the corner…

What You’ll Get and What It Costs

For $70 per year, you can get our full-works print and digital membership—you’ll receive all 4 print issues of the magazine per year straight to your door, as well as exclusive access to the paywalled Members Only section of VICE.com.

While print is back, that doesn’t mean we’re leaving the internet behind. With a digital membership, you can jump the paywall into our Members Only Section, where you’ll get exclusive early access to brand new VICE documentaries before they’re streaming anywhere else, as well as members-only content from our best writers and columnists.

If, for some reason, you don’t want the magazine, you can get an annual digital-only membership for $20 a year—or $2 per month, if you’d rather do it that way.

The cash we raise through this will be funneled straight back into making more great video and written editorial for you to gorge yourselves silly upon. It’s a virtuous cycle, insert yourself into it by browsing the various membership options below.

Shortly after signing up for the print subscription, you will receive an email asking you to confirm your shipping address. By signing up you agree to our privacy policy, terms and conditions, and our fulfilment policy.

WHAT’S INCLUDED IN THE PRINT & DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION?

• 4 x issues of VICE Magazine, one arriving at your doorstep every quarter
• Exclusive access to new VICE documentaries
• Our paywalled Members Only section, featuring exclusive features and columns

PRICE: $70 PER YEAR

WHAT’S INCLUDED IN THE DIGITAL-ONLY SUBSCRIPTION?

• Exclusive access to an all-new VICE documentaries
• Our paywalled Members Only section, featuring exclusive features and columns

PRICE: $20 PER YEAR or $2 PER MONTH

WHAT NEXT?

• The print & digital subscription includes access to 4 magazines a year, while the digital only subscription includes online access to exclusive films and articles
• By signing up you agree to our privacy policy (here), terms and conditions (here) and our fulfillment policy (here)
• The magazine will be shipped internationally. Please get in touch if you have any queries related to shipping

Contact membersupport@vice.com with any questions related to the subscription

The post You Can Now Subscribe to VICE Magazine appeared first on VICE.

Is it possible to pinpoint the exact moment when millennial culture finally died? Did the generation ever collectively acknowledge that its time was up and willingly pass the baton to Gen Z? The pandemic was an obvious inflection point, encouraging (or forcing) millennials to embrace their geriatric tendencies while upending so many of the prior decade’s cultural norms, killing the ZIRP economy, and ending the End of History. But maybe, more precisely, the generation’s run ended in summer 2021: the post-vaccine vibe shift, as described by the writer and trend forecaster Sean Monahan, when everyone came out of the house and all the latent change built up during the preceding year coalesced, with millennials stumbling into the blinding sunlight and realizing they lived in a bewildering new world.

If the millennial corpse had already been stiffening for a while, another death certificate was issued in early 2024, when two pillars of the generation’s identity, VICE and Pitchfork, already significantly changed since their original 90s/00s incarnations, both approached the brink of vanishing altogether. VICE Media announced that it would no longer publish new material on VICE.com, while Pitchfork would be merged into GQ by its parent company, Condé Nast, which had owned it since 2015. Although neither actually happened—you’re reading this, after all—both close calls hinted at the fragility of the millennial generation’s legacy going forward. They also raised an existential question: What have millennials left behind that’s actually worth preserving? In the twilight of their cultural relevance, a scan of the horizon reveals few enduring monuments that are solid enough to cast a shadow. 

The monuments that have endured also attest to the generation’s decline. The electric scooter boom of the late 2010s—arguably the millennials’ swan song, and an exemplary symbol of their distinctive culture—produced a strange but predictable side effect: piles of discarded and destroyed Bird and Lime scooters littering embankments and ponds and other marginal urban spaces. The literal trashing of these whimsical avatars of the millennial economy, documented in an Instagram account called Bird Graveyard, was also a fitting metaphor for the eventual state of so many other millennial artifacts: expired but still visible, scattered throughout the urban environment, persistent reminders of an embarrassing recent past. Today, these proverbial junk piles contain more than just scooters, but also IPAs, escape rooms, listicles, smash burgers, Garden State, MySpace, brunch, @shitmydadsays, tight jeans, sans serif fonts, life hacks, axe throwing bars, Williamsburg, speakeasies, electroclash, fast casual bowls, food trucks, food delivery apps, ridesharing apps, laundry apps—apps for every conceivable action—and even 44th US President Barack Obama himself. Much of this remains permanently embedded in the landscape. No longer fresh, it’s now just the mundane infrastructure of everyday life. What IPAs do you guys have on draft?

The same month as the VICE and Pitchfork news, the New York Times published a piece by Joe Bernstein, “Hark, the Millennial Death Wail,” about millennials’ fraught relationship to their own aging process. Bernstein notes that the generation’s insecurity about their waning relevance has been inseparable from their need to keep talking about it. Every month, it seems, there’s a new thinkpiece about how millennials are washed, usually written by millennials themselves (including this one, I suppose)—but the generation seems unconvinced by its own self-deprecating argument. “Millennials’ ability to drive a cycle of discourse around our age means we can still shape the conversation,” Bernstein writes. “For millennials who criticized their boomer parents for decades for not shuffling off the stage, the ‘look how old we are’ act may serve another purpose: prolonging our own time in the spotlight, and our own sense that we are the protagonists of history.”

This kind of navel-gazing, of course, has always been a millennial hallmark. Millennials invented social media and were immediately its most dedicated users, becoming the first generation who could expect their own audience regardless of how exceptional they were, and the first to enjoy a forum where they could process their neuroses and insecurities in public. One could hardly expect millennials to bow out gracefully after 20 years of such preening online; talking is what they do best, and it’s becoming clear they’ll still be doing it when no one else is listening. They don’t know how to stop. 2023, Max Read wrote in the NY Times, was the year that millennials finally aged out of the internet. But don’t get too excited: That doesn’t mean they logged off.

After all, millennials have nowhere to go. The internet is where they live. The boomers own property and land; in lieu of more traditional assets, the wealth that millennials accumulated online is their generational nest egg. “We often ridicule boomers for being unable to grow up, but at least they had something else to move on to,” writes the literary essayist Chris Jesu Lee. “At this rate, millennials look to be fighting for TikTok territory against Zoomers as every single one of us enters middle age. And then comes Gen Alpha.” Of course, Boomers never willingly passed the baton either, but they held a stronger position when their time came. Bernstein quotes Cheryl Russell, the former editor of American Demographics magazine, who declared that “the era of the rule of the young is over” just as boomers were reaching middle age in the 80s. “The boomers would still wield cultural power; they would just leave childish things behind.” That’s easier to pull off when your power is grounded in the material world.

Boxed in on all sides, then, millennials will indeed go down fighting—a zombie generation resisting its scheduled euthanasia, or a hydra that grows two new heads for every one cut off by a self-conscious thinkpiece, gorging on its own looming irrelevance and shitting out content. Reports of the millennials’ demise may yet be premature. Someone will have to ask them to leave, politely or not.

But that kind of closure is a thing of the past. One of the emergent qualities of the digital culture millennials shaped is that nothing ends any more. Wars and pandemics drag on; aging bands keep touring in a perpetual state of reunion rather than breaking up; politicians circle the drain into their eighties and nineties; bygone aesthetics and styles are forgotten and rediscovered in shorter and shorter cycles. We seem unable to fully metabolize experiences and move on, for better or worse; we suffer from cultural acid reflux.

The paradox of the internet is that it enables this endlessness while also making culture less durable and more disposable. Millennials, again, were the first generation to bank a large share of their cultural capital online, which now seems to guarantee its swift erasure. As the generation’s Obama-era heyday recedes farther into the past, its most significant accomplishments feel increasingly elusive, hazy, out of reach, or just illegible, revealing the digital ground it all stood upon to be an unstable foundation. The rewards for millennials’ technological adventurousness have been obvious—wealth, attention, convenience, abundance of all kinds—with the drawbacks mostly becoming evident only later. And one of these drawbacks is ephemerality: The millennials’ curse is to have built their castles on sand, to see their contributions begin fading as quickly as they once appeared, to leave no lasting proof of their erstwhile relevance. The cultural significance that was attainable in the 20th century has itself become a casualty of the internet. All those moments lost in time, like tears in rain. 

In 1999, a formative millennial text taught us that if you die in the Matrix you die in real life. As it is turning out, the generation’s own longevity doesn’t extend far beyond its digital footprint either.

For a true millennial death rattle, there is no better example than one of the generation’s most important representatives and in many ways the architect of its identity: Mark Zuckerberg, now 40, who recently overhauled his public persona in the very “hype dad” style that Monahan’s ‘vibe shift’ essay ridiculed (as an example of those left behind by the vibe shift), embracing streetwear and MMA and exposure to sunlight, in jarring contrast to his familiar nerdy image. As the rest of the millennial zeitgeist fades from view, Zuckerberg’s status as an American oligarch—a position he attained by encouraging and then exploiting his own generation’s narcissism—ensures unavoidable visibility. If not for the business angle, it would be tempting to call his transformation a midlife crisis, but those belong to prior generations.

Millennials hang on for dear life until the end.

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The post An Obituary for Millennial Culture appeared first on VICE.

This year, we scoured the globe for 20 rising stars who are revolutionizing photography. Ada Zielińska shoots flaming cars in Warsaw and wildfires around the world. Adam Rouhana documents the joys and burdens of life in Palestine. Carlos Idun-Tawiah finds cinematic beauty in his Ghanaian family’s photo albums. Kristina Rozhkova takes super-raw, sensual portraits in Russia. Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart makes fun fine art on a Canadian farm. Sara Benabdallah showcases the women who make Marrakech tick.

And that’s not even half of it. Literally, physically, it’s a big issue.

Free copies of will be available at some of our favorite photography labs, bars, and local businesses in New York City and London over the next couple of weeks. Pick up an issue at Bushwick Community Darkroom and photodom in NYC or magCulture and Photobook Cafe in London. And if you miss out on one of those limited-supply freebies, don’t worry, because there’s more good news.

The whole VICE Magazine is coming back, in all its sprawling and salacious glory. We’re launching a brand new subscription to deliver four magazines a year, anywhere in the world. The subscription will also give you access to a bunch of online exclusives—like extended films that are too risque for social media. The first issue you get will be The Photo Issue 2024.

Sign up below to get a heads up on when it launches before anyone else. Then, without further ado, meet the 20 stars of The Photo Issue 2024.

Ada Zielińska

Read more: Ada Zielińska on watching the world burn.

ADAM ROUHANA

ANDRÉ RAMOS-WOODARD

Read more: André Ramos-Woodard remixes Black cartoon history.

AVA CAMPANA

Read more: Ava Campana’s absurd, All-American self-portraits.

AVION PEARCE

Read more: Avion Pearce embraces darkness in their queer Black photography.

CARLOS IDUN-TAWIAH

Read more: Carlos Idun-Rawiah turns family photo albums into Ghanaian epics.

HENRY CRAWLEY

KAROLINA WOJTAS

KRAIWITCH TUNGSOMBOON

KRISTINA ROZHKOVA

LAUREN DACCACHE

LISS FENWICK

Read more: Liss Fenwick turns termite mounds into supermodels of the Outback.

LUIS MANUEL DIAZ

MINH NGOC NGUYEN

ROBERT HICKERSON

SAGE SZKABARNICKI-STUART

SARA BENABDALLAH

Read more: Sara Benabdallah captures the soul of Morocco with help from her grandma.

SHAHRAM SAADAT

Read more: Shahram Saadat turns carwashes into surreal time capsules.

TÔN TÔN BO

TUMI ADELEYE

Plus: 15 Years of Jake Burghart

Read more: Jake Burghart on sneaking cameras into the world’s danger zones.

The post Introducing VICE’s Photo Issue 2024 appeared first on VICE.

Combining original portraits with cartoons from American history, photographer André Ramos-Woodard is redrawing the future to tell a black and queer story that’s distinctly his own.nh

ANDRÉ RAMOS-WOODARD: I’m a trained photographer, but I’ve always liked drawing. When I was a kid, I would watch anime with my cousin and redraw all the characters from Dragon Ball Z as Black people.

Years later, I looked into the history of illustration, and that’s when I found all these minstrel caricatures that I used in Black Snafu. It was 2020, after the death of George Floyd and many other Black people, and it felt really important for me to dig into that.

I was making photographs that I considered celebratory, highlighting Black experiences, then drawing on top of the images to juxtapose the truth of Black people versus the way Black people have been portrayed throughout American cartooning. It’s a little bit of an act of reclamation, using these characters to teach about American history.

But honestly, it got kind of tiring. Stealing these characters, which I would consider detrimental to Black identity, was exhausting. So, I started to incorporate characters from my childhood, like Spawn or Sticky and Fifteen Cent from The Proud Family, that are pro-Black and just powerful, fun, courageous, and celebratory.

Even though I’m using references in my work, I try to fight against the idea that you have to have a historical background to really dig into art. My homies, my friends, my family, I want them to see themselves in these characters. I want them to find something that they relate to.

Follow André Ramos-Woodard on Instagram.

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The post André Ramos-Woodard Remixes Black Cartoon History in Bold Portraits appeared first on VICE.

Flaming cars and wildfires reveal the sorts of catastrophes that can feel distant but are obviously already here. The daughter of a firefighter, photographer Ada Zielińska explains how she got into watching the world burn.

ADA ZIELIŃSKA: When I got into photography, my first big idea was to stage car crashes. I choreographed scenes depicting the aftermath of accidents and the people around them, which I thought were very cinematic. Eventually, I thought about setting a car on fire. I had no idea how to do it, but I remembered my dad was a firefighter when he was very young. He used to tell me stories about putting out fires in Warsaw. I explained my idea and asked him to help me, and he said, “Let’s do it.”

Dad had a friend who owned a junkyard, so we went there. My dad knew exactly what to do, replacing the gasoline in the tank with water. I, on the other hand, was so afraid of the fire that I didn’t take any good pictures. I remember running around in a panic with my camera in my hand. Still, I wanted to go back to it. So I started calling my meeting up with my dad every few weekends, and we would set things on fire. Mostly cars. 

After about five years of doing this, I turned it into the book Pyromaniac Manual. By then, I was scheduling fires with a team of firefighters and directing them. They used my work for training exercises.

There’s one photo of a steering wheel on fire that I took from inside the car. The firefighters put a belt on me so that if something happened, they could pull me out. But when it got to that point, it wasn’t exciting anymore. It wasn’t dangerous. I knew what was going to happen: the tires and airbags were going to explode, the windows were going to crack. 

So I looked further afield. I began traveling to the sites of wildfires, mostly after they had been extinguished. 

In one sense, I’m trying to find beauty in these catastrophes, however crude that sounds. And, later, to think about what they mean. 

In the modern world, we have control over everything. But when a natural disaster comes, even in the most developed countries, there is nothing we can do. Right now, there’s flooding in Dubai. I wish I was there. People have cars that cost $2 million, and they can’t do anything about it. Their cars are just floating away.

I have this memory from a burnt forest I photographed in Australia. It was all black and still. It wasn’t burning, but it was still super hot in there. And what struck me the most was that the birds weren’t singing. It was complete silence. It was so overwhelming. On the one hand, it was, I don’t know, the worst thing in the world. But on the other hand, it was so beautiful and scary.

Follow Ada Zielińska on Instagram.

Learn more about the magazine, subscription, and how we’re building a new era for VICE by joining the waitlist below.

The post Ada Zielińska Chases Catastrophe with Her Camera appeared first on VICE.

These intricately staged photographs offer glimpses of queer Black lives, both real and imagined. Here, Avion Pearce talks about the power of representation—and the responsibilities that places on them.

AVION PEARCE: In middle school, I found my dad’s little 35mm camera. I started taking it to school, taking photos of my friends and figuring out how to make an image. It was this thing I was doing for the joy of it. I felt like this was a way of creating a world without using language, and that was appealing to me.

It wasn’t until I left school in 2011 that I decided to take it seriously. I started thinking about history. One of the first projects was a fake archive. I created these two Black women in a relationship who were alive in the 1930s and 40s and created a whole world around them. I made stills from what might be a period film of these two women alongside an archive of their belongings: letters, objects, clothing, etc.

I was thinking: I might not have access to a history like this, but I can imagine it, and I think that’s really powerful. It was a way to create something I desperately wanted to see.

Then I turned to photographing people in my community in Brooklyn. I was thinking about survival as the city is rapidly changing, as gentrification and the housing crisis are issues, and a lot of people are being displaced. I’m exploring my responsibility in photographing a community that is trying to survive in this place—which I feel very protective of.

I think of photography as a really powerful tool for documenting and recording a time, place, and people, informing our ideas about these things, and confronting the issues of visibility and invisibility at the same time. I can use this tool to make commentary about the world around me. Maybe it can’t change laws, but it can impact the people who see the work.

I’ve gotten comments like: “The colors are so dark, this doesn’t feel very joyous to me.” My response is that I don’t owe anyone joy. Just because I’m photographing a marginalized community doesn’t mean I have to photograph them a certain way. I think that the images should be as complicated as the things that I’m speaking about. And I think that darkness is so beautiful and rich, and there’s so much there, and so much is revealed with the light.

People feel excited to be photographed in a way that’s more nuanced, poetic, and sentimental, even. That’s all that I want: to create a world and invite people in.

Follow Avion Pearce on Instagram.

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The post Avion Pearce Embraces Darkness in Their Queer Black Photography appeared first on VICE.

VICE’s longtime creative partner, Jake Burghart has helped to craft over 100 documentaries in more than 70 countries. Over 15 years, he worked on many of the films that came to define the sort of hard-hitting, courageous, and mind-boggling stories that VICE traded in, including “The VICE Guide to Iran,” Dennis Rodman’s visit to North Korea, and on-the-ground coverage of the 2011 Arab Spring.

On these expeditions, he always shot photos for keepsakes, using whatever camera he had with him at the time: a 35mm, medium format, DSLR, or a cheap point-and-shoot. We asked Burghart to sift through his hard drives and share the stories behind some of these monumental moments.

CONGO

This photo was taken deep in the jungle on the border of Congo and Rwanda. I was with Suroosh, and we were going to interview the Mai Mai, a militia group. On the way there, we came to the last U.N. outpost. We had tea with these guys there, and they strongly advised us not to go any further into the jungle-which we did anyway.

We were quickly captured by a group of teenage rebels with machine guns who took us back to their camp. It wasn’t until months later, when we were home and got all the translations, that we realized they’d said something along the lines of: “Hey, boss, we found these white guys in the jungle. Should we just kill them?” But we had no idea that line had been spoken while we were there.

Our fixer explained to them that we were going to see the Mai-Mai, and these guys were like, “If they’re guests of the Mai-Mai, we can’t touch them. We actually have to make sure they’re safe.” So they escorted us to the Mai-Mai camp. It was an overnight walk through the jungle.
There was a funeral going on when we arrived; fires, drumming, and chanting. They put us in a grass hut with a mud floor and said they’d see us in the morning. This photo was taken the next morning: These are the main guys of the Mai-Mai village and their guards. And this is us setting up for the interview.

EGYPT

This is in Egypt during the revolution. We sort of snuck in—we were there as tourists, but we were filming in Tahrir Square, Cairo, during the day when demonstrations were happening. This photo was taken at night, near the presidential palace—there were all these kids in black masks throwing Molotov cocktails and firing slingshots and everything else at the palace. They had lasers they were shooting into the cameras, and they were getting tear-gassed. This guy is running away from the palace, across the no-man’s land, and the tear gas is shooting over his head. We spent a bunch of nights filming these guys and all of this until we were eventually arrested.

It was scary because we were held in custody in a country that had no government at the time. They had ousted the president, and there was no new president—the country was under martial law. They just sort of put us in a room and began questioning us as though we were spies. Luckily, the producer got out a tweet about us being captured, which became news in itself. The U.S. State Department found out we were there and sent someone to get us. It was the ultimate version of your mom picking you up from jail when you were a kid: To have this black SUV from the U.S. State Department pick us up from Egyptian prison and take us back. They were very cool about it.

IRAN

I’ve been to Iran several times. This was taken on the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I’ve always liked this photo because you see these guys on stage with the yellow flags they’re passing out, and everyone’s got these sort of “Death to America” signs, and it’s all very serious. But there’s also this guy here selling colorful balloons. I like that juxtaposition of the sort of carnival air these balloons give and this very serious Iranian monument on this very serious day.

JAPAN

We were doing a story on hostess bars, weird cuddle clubs, and the different things on offer in Japan. And, you know, the Yakuza runs most of that, if not all of it. So we were kind of trying to get in tight with these guys so that we could film in those places. These guys are all tattooed up, and one night, they started just showing off their tattoos. This guy was showing the full scope of what he had going on, and he just took off his clothes in the back of a tattoo parlor where we were. One guy is smoking and holding a baby, and another guy in a leather jacket is looking on; there are Pringles and weird DVDs in the background. I don’t know—it’s just one of those absurd photos.

CHINA

This was during the Creators Project days. We were doing this big event in Beijing, and afterward, we decided to see the Great Wall before going home. It was a little road trip we did just for fun. This is a random place on the side of the road. We stopped to get snacks,
and this place was there, and Shane ended up playing pool with this dude. I don’t know exactly what it is, just a giant place with a pool table. But I feel like it was classic Shane of that time: Texas shirt, army jacket, earring. He was down to hang with anyone. He loved going to places, and on our way, he’d be like: “Oh, here’s this random guy who has a crazy style and seems cool. I’m going to have a beer and play pool with him.”

RUSSIA

This is a photo of Edward Snowden at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. It’s this famous hotel where, supposedly, every room is wired. This is where they put the Americans so they can spy on them, at least that’s what people say. I don’t know, I looked around and I couldn’t find any wires. But all the rooms have this really cool old-school Russian vibe.

We met Snowden in secret in this room, and Shane did this really long interview with him. In this photo, they’re just kind of having a moment. Snowden’s laughing at whatever Shane had said, and I just like that it’s a pulled-back look at these two guys talking. Snowden was lovely and cool and had so many amazing things to say. I feel like everything that he said about surveillance is true and continues to come true.

NORTH KOREA

This was another anniversary- forget what for, but there was a major show of force on display. We were in Pyongyang on a media junket. I was with Shane, and we were alongside people from CNN, BBC, and Fox News. The North Koreans were parading their ICBMs and other big missiles, and it was just a really insane thing to witness. Their precision, their marching, how in time they were, and how aggressively they marched. You can see that haze in the background, all from these thousands of guys just marching and kicking dust into the air. There were guys with bazookas marching, women marching, and then guys on horseback, and then a crazy stretch Mercedes with GoPros on it. Absurd things, scary things, so much shit going on.

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Working between reality and fiction, Shahram Saadat recreates the strangeness that lurks in mundane life. In these carefully constructed images, he offers a unique way to appreciate the ordinary.

SHAHRAM SAADAT: Initially, I was drawn to documentary photography and capturing the everyday in its eccentricities. Going from a documentary focus where everything is erratic and spontaneous, I chose to preserve these elements and work toward a more controlled photographic environment.

I began to plan out the photos that I wanted to take, from the concept to the setting. My first scenario was of a friend on a static exercise bike in the middle of a busy road in London—that acted as proof that I could execute the narratives that I was beginning to build in the way that I wanted. So I started organizing further shoots with a wider creative team to help elevate the final outcome.

Many of my projects have been studies of people from certain areas, whether it be the people from Bath interacting with an electrostatic machine or people from Norwich posing in target practice posters. I like photographing people who haven’t necessarily been in a controlled photographic environment before. Their interaction shifts between each image as they become more at ease with the setting, and it brings a freshness more in keeping with the documentary aesthetic. Every project still reflects my interest in this field but in a much more refined environment, putting the concept first and the image second.

The apparatus and the dichotomy it poses have always intrigued me. On the one hand, I feel it creates a useful filter between the photographer and the subject, giving them a sense of distance in the moment. At the same time, it empowers and enhances the creative possibilities. The camera allows the subject to be uninhibited and lets them express themselves freely.

My recent study, The Whale, depicts people going through a carwash in southern England. I was interested in exploring whether there was a moment in our lives when we could afford to be guilt-free about not optimizing our time effectively. Initially, I thought about showering and teeth brushing, but even those actions get rushed sometimes. Then came the carwash, a three- to five-minute window where you are forced to remain in your car for the cycle. Allowing you to zone out, argue, kiss, or sing in order to pass the time. A moment of respite.

Ultimately, my practice is inspired by human idiosyncrasies—I channel the erratic spontaneity of documentary-style photography into staged scenes, underpinned by conceptual thinking.

Follow Shahram Saadat on Instagram.

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