Vlad Zorin is the controversial photographer unmasking queer art

After creating Soft Power – a controversial 2022 exhibition featuring videos of nude men masturbating with toy army tanks – mere metres from the Kremlin, Vlad Zorin was forced to flee Russia. The photographer’s anti-war stance and his work’s radical sexuality had made daily life impossible. At this stage, Zorin had already released his book, With Love From Russia — two hundred and fifty pages of hidden queerness bubbling beneath the surface of Vladamir Putin’s Russia (read: nude portraits of young gay men in startlingly explicit poses). Alongside the pictures, were eighteen in-depth interviews shedding light on the lives, plights and hopes of the book’s subjects. Combining these photographs of masked men – underwear spread below their knees and legs tangled above their heads – with their shockingly direct confessions, With Love From Russia (2022) was the first book to so viscerally explore queer sexuality in contemporary Russia. After all, it’s not every day you read about an 18-year-old Egor from Moscow recalling how “the first time I came, I was lying on the bathroom floor”. Unsurprisingly, both projects came with a great personal risk for Zorin.

Skip forward and Zorin, facing exile from his motherland, found himself alone in France. And, with little other choice, committed to understanding his new world. His method of choice? A two-year, thousand-kilometre hitchhike through French cities and countryside, documenting the lives of the men he met along the way. This array of stories and photographs would become his much-anticipated sophomore release, With Love From France (2024). Skip a further couple hundred miles and months later, Zorin is exhibiting some of his photos from the book at his first solo exhibition, Vlad Zorin: Unmasked, at Upsilon Gallery in Mayfair. It’s here that the Russian photographer tells me about his inspiration for the book. “The move [to France] was a real challenge — a new country, a different mentality, a different culture. My project became a way of adapting and trying to understand my new home.” That isn’t to say, though, that what Zorin discovered aligned with his expectations. “Living in Russia,” he says, “I idealised Europe and France, but working on With Love From France helped me realise how complex and multifaceted the world is.”

With three hundred pages of portraits of men stripped bare, musings on love, identity and queerness, as well as a personal essay from Zorin and a preface by Thomas Vampouille – the editorial director of French magazine Têtu – it’s not hard to see why the photographer landed on the word “multifaceted”. The volume, hard-bound in baby pink cloth and an unassuming gold cursive font, features twenty-one interviews and the bodies of over fifty men, the youngest just twenty, the oldest seventy-six. “I didn’t adhere to any strict rules when choosing my characters,” Zorin says. “I found interlocutors on the streets, in the subway, on social networks and hitchhiking. I never knew what story was [going to be] behind them.” Some of Zorin’s subjects, he admits, were more intentional. He reached out to his heroes for the book — perhaps most notably the artistic duo Pierre and Gilles, whose own nudes make an appearance.

With so many participants, some of With Love From France’s excerpts are inevitably lighthearted — take contributor Ewen’s discussion of Twitter porn, losing his virginity to his parents’ friend and an Italian lover who “used to come in a perfect diagonal line”, for example. Others, though, are much heavier. And it’s in these darker moments that the value With Love From France as a political effort is most striking. While Zorin recognises that France faces vastly different challenges from Russia, he concedes that “conflicts of viewpoints remain, and there is work to be done” in both nations. For him, the whole purpose of his work is to highlight these complexities — something that Vampouille nicely summarises in the preface to With Love From France. “We are in the process,” he writes, “of dismantling the frameworks that support the heterosexual, patriarchal and fatal queericial order.” I notice that the word ‘revolution’ keeps coming up, too. If there is going to be a revolution, Vampouille continues, it must be queer. Standing in the Upsilon Gallery, I think how it wouldn’t be a stretch to claim that the stories Zorin tells in his second book is part of that fight.

One of the most poignant stories Zorin tells me about is his interview with Yassin from Saint-Denis. After a trip to Thailand, Yassin was diagnosed with HIV. He describes “screaming and crying”, and feeling that this was a death sentence. “[Yassin] shows that life does not end in the face of adversity, but instead can take on new meaning,” Zorin says. “His fortitude and commitment to being the best version of himself inspire faith in possibility and the power of overcoming.” This payoff between fear and freedom is somewhat of a recurring theme in the book. In fact, it underpins one of Zorin’s most frequent motifs — a white mask covering the faces of his subjects. In With Love From Russia, it represented a much-needed security measure for queer Russian men, but now it has taken on a new meaning. “The [Russian] society made me hide behind masks, which became an integral part of my life,” Zorin says. “In my art, the mask has a different meaning. It’s a symbol of hope and faith in a future where people no longer have to hide to avoid being judged or stigmatised. It symbolises the path to freedom.”

Equally important to the photographer is male nudity, which he sees as a protest against the values he grew up with in his home city of Chelyabinsk. For Zorin, nudity – especially in a softer and queer form – is a way to “challenge the stigmatisation of male sexuality”. “There is still a stereotype that men should be exclusively masculine, strong and not show their sensual or tender side,” he clarifies. While Zorin’s work is about spreading a wider message, though, it has an undeniable personal element, too. “I always base my art on my own feelings and experiences,” Zorin tells me. “This is critical, because only by living something on a personal level can I create art that is filled with intimacy and sensuality.” He continues: “I never think about how my work will be perceived. If you start thinking about it, art becomes a product. What matters is the process itself, which comes from the heart, and people’s reactions follow.”

While Zorin doesn’t immediately think about other people’s reactions, it doesn’t mean that the photographer doesn’t care about them. Hidden within the pages of With Love From France is a questionnaire with the aptly cheeky subtitle, “… it’s your turn to play”. Here, readers can reflect on everything from their early childhood memories to love and sexual fantasies, jotting their musings down on the section’s notebook-style paper. When I ask him about the questionnaire, Zorin replies: “Any work of art is a dialogue. That’s why I decided to create a questionnaire with the same questions I asked the participants.” He’s also keen to point out that his readers are welcome to send responses to him — the photographer’s already been moved by parents telling him that his work helped them accept their queer children, he tells me.

Coming off With Love From France and his current solo exhibition, Zorin is looking forward to the future. And, though he has long-term plans for more “With Love From” projects in the likes of the UK and Japan, his mind is currently elsewhere. Right now, he’s finishing his Blue Brothers series, an ode to his decade-long relationship with partner and muse Yulian Antukh. “It’s a kind of manifesto of love and liberation that I carried within me while living in Russia,” he explains. Now based in Paris, the photographer is free to share this manifesto with the world. It’s a case in point that Zorin has, indeed, lifted his own mask. It’s bittersweet to think about — a reminder that an act of liberation in one part of the world is a perilous act of rebellion in another. And that’s something Zorin knows as well as anyone.

Curated by Gemma Rolls Bentley, Vlad Zorin: Unmasked is showing at the Upsilon Gallery, Mayfair until 18 January 2025.