From sacred sisters to hyper-sexualised models: PhotoVogue festival – in pictures
India’s female bodybuilders, unnatural Italian models, Asian cyborgs and erased Afghan women … here are the highlights of the many-stranded PhotoVogue festival, in Milan for fashion week
Thu 26 Feb 2026 02.00 EST
Last modified on Thu 26 Feb 2026 04.56 EST
Jinyong Lian – Trust Me
The festival’s central show, Women by Women, celebrates how women express and imagine themselves while confronting the growing fragility of their rights and visibility. Lian’s Trust Me series (semi-fictional portraits of Asian women) explores self-doubt and emotional control. The PhotoVogue festival 2026 runs from 1-4 March during Milan fashion week at the Biblioteca Nazionale BraidensePhotograph: Jinyong Lian
Bettina Pittaluga – She Saw Me
Photographing mostly women and LGBTQ+ individuals, Pittaluga is interested in erasure and domination. Her images suggest a form of looking built on trust.Photograph: Bettina Pittaluga
Elsa Hammarén – Andie, Darling
Hammarén examines the shifting terrain between photographer and muse, documenting her relationship with Andie, a young trans woman in Brooklyn.Photograph: Elsa Hammarén
Magdalena Wosinska – Mama
The Mama series is a meditation on care. Over eight years, she photographed her mother through illness, fragility, and eventual death, reclaiming a woman diminished by migration, illness and invisibility.Photograph: Magdalena Wosinska
Kiana Hayeri – No Woman’s Land, Afghanistan
Hayeri documents life under a regime that has erased women from public spaces: girls are barred from secondary education; women from universities, work, and even from moving freely without male guardians. This project focuses on restriction and resilience. Hayeri shows us quiet forms of defiance unfolding behind closed doors. Rather than reducing Afghan women to symbols of victimhood, she finds complexity and endurance.Photograph: Kiana Hayeri for Carmignac Foundation
Keerthana Kunnath – Not What You Saw
Kunnath photographs female bodybuilders from south India who challenge ideas about femininity, and the notion that strength and muscularity are masculine. Kunnath removes them from gyms and situates them within recognisable Indian settings, sometimes styled in tradition clothing. The juxtaposition is deliberate, confounding categorisation. Photograph: Keerthana Kunnath
Carla Rossi – Bellissima
Rossi follows Rebecca, an 18-year-old aspiring model navigating the rituals of castings and rejection within Italy’s beauty industry. The project traces how media has manufactured and commodified female identity. By referencing the hyper-sexualised TV culture of the Silvio Berlusconi era, Rossi exposes what’s behind the spectacle. Beauty here is not natural. It is staged, disciplined and endlessly evaluated. Rebecca’s perseverance becomes the emotional core of the work. Photograph: Carla Rossi
Clara Belleville – Girls
Belleville is a French photographer who lives and works in Paris. Her work, Girls, captures women who feature in her life as they are, in everyday moments.Photograph: Clara Belleville
Delali Ayivi – Togo Family Ties
Ayivi approaches womanhood as a sacred and generative force. Sisterhood here is not symbolic. It is infrastructure. Ayivi shows women not as archetypes, but as complex, spiritual and defiant beings.Photograph: Delali Ayivi
Daniel Vaysberg – Untitled, from Archive series, 2022–24
Futurespective, in collaboration with Vogue Ukraine, showcases the work of a new generation of Ukrainian artists. Vaysberg was born in Kharkiv and blends documentary style with fashion. His series Archive was shot in the suburbs of Kharkiv and Berlin. Having grown up in Kharkiv’s Saltivka, the largest residential district in Europe, Vaysberg asks how far you can move beyond the environment you were brought up in.Photograph: Daniel Vaysberg
Tania Shcheglova – Pole, from Innerland
Shcheglova specialises in ‘inner world portraiture’. The subjects are neither staged characters nor purely observed figures. Instead, they appear as multilayered beings – inseparable from their environment. The body may disappear, the face may remain unseen Photograph: Tania Shcheglova
Volodymyr Kaminetsky – Twins, Paris, 2024
Originally from Zaporizhzhia, Kaminetsky moved to Italy at the age of 15. He studied photography at the Rome University of Fine Arts and now lives in London. He works mainly in fashion photography. His work from the series Twins is a sensual portrait of two young Ukrainian brothers, taken against the carefree backdrop of the Parisian sky.Photograph: Volodymyr Kaminetsky
Alina Prisich – Tatko, 2022, Verkhovyna, Ukraine
Originally from Luhansk, now under Russian occupation, Prisich lives and works in Kyiv. Her photographs have a childlike spontaneity. This work, from the series Tatko (Dad), was shot in the Carpathian village of Verkhovyna, in the west of the country. It examines the line between childhood and adulthood, tenderness and strength, as a whole generation watch their parents being called to defend their homes and country from Russia.Photograph: Alina Prisich
Ira Lupu – Kseniya’s Hair From Spovid (Confession) series, Vasylkiv, Kyiv region, Ukraine, 2024
Lupu was born and brought up in Odesa, and her work focuses on how the metaphorical and dreamlike intersect with the harsh human world. She examines trauma with forensic precision. Kseniya’s Hair is an intimate portrait of an internally displaced student from Zaporizhzhia, photographed in Vasylkiv, home to a military base frequently targeted by Russia.Photograph: Ira Lupu
Elena Subach – Cinderella, Grandmothers on the Edge of Heaven, Lviv, Ukraine, 2019
Subach is a Ukrainian visual artist based in Lviv. Her work weaves personal and collective histories, exploring the interplay between people, their land and cultural memory. She questions religion and tradition and dissects the legacy of the Soviet colonial past. Her work from the series Grandmothers on the Edge of Heaven is a portrait of an elderly Ukrainian woman during a religious celebration. Photograph: Elena Subach
Zhang Ahuei – Lullaby of the Moon (2023). She cradles the moon. Darkness listens
East and Southeast Asian Panorama celebrates diverse artistic voices from east and south-east Asia. Ahuei is a Taiwan-based photographer creating poetic portraits and expressive fashion imagery. His project, Where the Dream Rests, is a visual journey through sleep, silence and memory, with themes of surrealism and symbolism. Photograph: Zhang Ahuei
Ramona Jingru Wang – My friends are cyborgs, but that’s okay
Jingru Wang’s work explores how images interrupt reality and create connections between people and space.Photograph: Ramona Jingru Wang
Lean Lui – White Barracks
Lui is an artist and photographer based in Hong Kong. The White Barracks is the third work in Lui’s Girl’s Universe series, focusing on the fractures within power structures. Here, Lui imagines a fictional island inhabited by a battalion of girl cadets engaged in constant military drills. The naval uniforms worn by the girls symbolise discipline and authority and are closely tied to the iconography of imperialism. Photograph: Lean LuiExplore more on these topics
