There’s no neat throughline to this month’s most loved photo stories. Trying to draw easy comparisons and impose order on this blizzard of images doesn't do justice to their ambiguity and mystery. But each series is guided by its own unique integrity and purpose. Hard Copy is a photographic experiment, inviting photographers to reproduce their work with Xerox machines. Ashley Markle uses her camera to unpick her past and fill in the missing gaps with visual information. Mattia Zoppellaro takes pictures to commemorate his changing neighbourhood and assuage the feeling of loss. Eva Zar’s photographs celebrate the women who weave fantasies in New York’s strip clubs, while Tom Wood has spent years with his lens trained on the nightlife of Merseyside. Take a look below for a closer look...

ASHLEY MARKLE, LOW HANGING FRUIT

Our histories are tangled webs enmeshed with the stories of others. The nuances of our close relationships – be it with our family or our lovers – are so complex that they are impossible to unravel and fully understand. Photographer Ashley Markle has long-since used photography as a way of explicating her own life. Using dramatised self-portraits with cameos from her loved ones, she restages real scenes from her past or imagined moments she wished had happened. There’s a surreal undertone to some of her images. Often we see the camera in her hand, breaking the fourth wall. 

Her recent exhibition Low Hanging Fruit brought together four bodies of work, each exploring the dynamics of different relationships. “The stories encompass my entire life,” she told Dazed. “The work looks at why I am the way I am, why my parents are the way they are and why those reasons affect how we interact with each other. My goal is to explore my own questions and raw emotions.” 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

EVA ZAR, GOD IS A STRIPPER

Ideologically, strip clubs exist as sites of conflict, raising debates about the commodification of women’s bodies, beauty ideals and sexual labour. But as hives of intrigue built on potent themes such as performance, magic, money, beauty, sexuality and power, strip clubs continue to fascinate us. For photographer Eva Zar, stripping is the “purest form of performance”. Her ongoing project God is a Stripper presents a series of portraits of dancers from New York clubs. “When you think about it, the strip club becomes this very exaggerated, hyper visual of the world we live in: we all present ourselves in certain ways to be devoured, loved, accepted. We’re all exchanging something for something else,” she explained in a recent interview. “The club is just a really honest representation of that. A customer comes in, pays for pleasure, and receives an experience.”

While many photographers focus on the “reality’ of strip clubs – the grit behind the glamour – Zar’s portraits are romantic; goddess-like. “When you think about it, we as photographers have a unique gift that we can quite literally show others how we see the world,” she says. “I created a world for myself where there is romance and softness because I’ve been through so much darkness. I don’t think that makes my subjects, or me, any less fierce or strong. You can be aware of reality and choose to see the beauty in it and shape that version. The girls are creating this fairytale version of themselves that customers project their fantasies onto. I love photographing them just like that.”

Read the full story here on Dazed.

MATTIA ZOPPELLARO, GIAMBELLINO

As gentrification creeps through the overlooked suburbs of any city, it has the homogenising effect of erasing the existing culture and tenor of a place. Over recent years, photographer Mattia Zoppellaro has witnessed this happening in his home, Giambellino – one of Milan’s last remaining working-class strongholds. To capture the spirit of his neighbourhood, Zoppellaro began taking portraits of the locals in situ. This series presents the young faces of his beloved Giambellino, before existing families are priced out of the area entirely. Already, it has a cast of nostalgia – quaint shop signage in golden sunlight. If he were to take photographs of the locals in a decade, who would be living here? 

Read the full story here on Dazed.

TOM WOOD, AND LOVE COMES IN AT THE EYE

Tom Wood has a genius for creating the most memorable images among the comings and goings of unextraordinary everyday life. I adore his pictures for their kindness and the dignity with which they present their subjects. There’s a genuine quality of magic about his work. Best known for his pictures of Merseyside – particularly the Chelsea Reach nightclub – each image is a rich vignette, loaded with gossip and drama. His latest photo book, And Love Comes In at the Eye, is an extra-special collection of photographs from his immense archive of over a million images. It’s a trove of late-night erotic encounters on the dancefloors, stairwells and banquettes of this legendary club.

Read the full story here on Dazed.

HARD COPY

As the scope and pace of technology mean we are encountering increasingly higher-resolution, high-def visuals, Hard Copy – an exhibition and accompanying zine – reimagines the work of photographers through the Xerox machine. While there is a charm about photocopies that evokes DIY and punk zines, it’s not a nostalgia-driven project. Instead, co-curator Aaren Stern told Dazed he is drawn to photocopying because “the non-preciousness of the materials, the physicality and tonality of the greys and blacks, and large-scale prints resonate with people. The Xerox obscures and creates a nice painterly, almost Robert Longo-like charcoal look. The prints are almost in motion.” This edition features established and emerging artists working across documentary, fashion and art, including Mark Borthwick, Christopher Anderson, Collier Schorr, Justine Kurland, Peter Sutherland, JH Engström, Jeff Mermelstein, Jim Mangan and Olivia Reavey

Read the full story here on Dazed.