From sacred sisters to hyper-sexualised models: PhotoVogue festival – in pictures

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Togo Family Ties by Delali Ayivi.

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

Generative force … Togo Family Ties by Delali Ayivi. Photograph: Delali Ayivi

Thu 26 Feb 2026 08.00 CET

Jinyong Lian – Trust MeThe 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 Braidense

Bettina Pittaluga – She Saw MePhotographing mostly women and LGBTQ+ individuals, Pittaluga is interested in erasure and domination. Her images suggest a form of looking built on trust.

Elsa Hammarén – Andie, DarlingHammarén examines the shifting terrain between photographer and muse, documenting her relationship with Andie, a young trans woman in Brooklyn.

Magdalena Wosinska – MamaThe 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.

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.

Keerthana Kunnath – Not What You SawKunnath 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.

BellissimaCarla Rossi follows Rebecca, an eighteen year old aspiring model navigating the rituals of castings and rejection within Italy’s beauty industry. The project traces how media has historically manufactured and commodified female identity. By referencing the hyper sexualised television culture of the Berlusconi era, Rossi exposes the machinery 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.

Clara Belleville – GirlsBelleville 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.

Delali Ayivi – Togo Family TiesAyivi 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.

Daniel Vaysberg – Untitled, from Archive series, 2022–24Futurespective, 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.

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

Volodymyr Kaminetsky – Twins, Paris, 2024Originally 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.

Alina Prisich – Tatko, 2022, Verkhovyna, UkraineOriginally 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.

Ira Lupu – Kseniya’s Hair From Spovid (Confession) series, Vasylkiv, Kyiv region, Ukraine, 2024Lupu 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.

Elena Subach – Cinderella, Grandmothers on the Edge of Heaven, Lviv, Ukraine, 2019Subach 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.

Zhang Ahuei – Lullaby of the Moon (2023). She cradles the moon. Darkness listensEast 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.

Ramona Jingru Wang – My friends are cyborgs, but that’s okayJingru Wang’s work explores how images interrupt reality and create connections between people and space.

Lean Lui – White BarracksLui 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.

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