Featured Pic: Marcus R
This month Elska marks its eight-year anniversary. During this time the project has published 43 beautiful print ‘bookazines’, each made in a different city and focused on sharing the bodies and voices of diverse men from LGBTQ+ communities around the world – every single continent except Antarctica!
The goal of Elska is two-fold. One is to transport readers to various cities across the globe, from places you expect to have a big gay scene as well as places we tend to know less about. That’s why Elska’s roster so far includes issues made in Berlin (Germany), Bogotá (Colombia), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Almaty (Kazakhstan), San Francisco (California), Dhaka (Bangladesh), and many more.
A second goal of Elska is to introduce readers to ordinary men in each city, the sort of guys they may meet if they visited the city themselves, and to show these people as just as, if not more, compelling and beautiful as any model or celebrity. These men are presented via an intimate photoshoot (some pics in the city streets, dressed in their own style; and some pics at home, with less or no clothes) plus a personal story (written by the participants themselves).
Here, the readers can get so close to these men that they can’t help but fall for them, and in the process, they can shed conventional notions of what kind of bodies are beautiful and what kind of stories are compelling. By seeing these subjects as real people, their gorgeousness is able to shine in a way that is refreshingly sincere and, according to Elska, still too absent in media.
“Before I started Elska I was trying to make my way in the fashion photography industry,” says Elska creator and chief photographer Liam Campbell. “Although I’d long adored editorial photography, and portraiture in general, once I started working in the London fashion scene I instantly felt a distaste for how models were treated.
“Elska was born out of a desire to have an outlet for my own creativity as well as my values, where I’d aim to shoot ‘normal’ people, never reject anyone, and present them with dignity.”
“I then combined this desire with my love for travel,” continues Liam, “and decided to make a little zine. For this I flew to Lviv (Ukraine), put out an open call for subjects, and then shot everyone who wanted to take part, revealing via my camera the beauty in every single one of the people I met there.
“I printed up a few hundred copies, told myself I didn’t care how well it sold, and readied myself for insults about how the ‘models’ weren’t model-esque enough or how the settings were too basic (I wanted to use people’s own homes for the shoots and their own neighbourhoods for the outdoor shots). In truth I did get some of this backlash, quite a bit in fact, but I also got a lot of love. Fortunately. my project resonated with enough people that after eight years Elska is still going, and it is stronger than ever.”
Elska’s collectable print publications are sold in select shops around the world and for order online.
Also available are limited edition signed art prints, e-zines, annual subscriptions, and more. A list of stockists and more information can be found on the Elska website.
