Photographer Tobias Zielony Explores How Fashion Can Manipulate and Conceal Identity

The German artist Tobias Zielony often works at night, photographing teenagers hanging out in the phosphorescent haze of urban half-light—subjects whose sharp-edged cool is simultaneously dulled and enhanced by their intense vulnerability. “There’s darkness where you can hide, but also as a young person you want to be seen,” he says of nighttime’s paradoxical appeal. “So you go somewhere where you can show off.” Darkness also serves as a canvas for playing around with the possibilities of artificial light. “Neon creates its own kind of landscape,” he says. “It’s like a whole topography of different colors. ”For his first editorial fashion shoot, Zielony photographed club kids and members of No Shade, a Berlin-based collective of female and nonbinary DJs, dressed in trenchcoats that range from lithely tailored to voluminous and tentlike. (Trenches, he notes, have “a kind of universal character, both in terms of gender but also in terms of time.”) Lit by flashlights, disco balls, and overhead fluorescents on the empty grounds of the Kreuzberg nightclub Gretchen, the resulting images are a little bit David Lynch, a little bit David Bowie. Building on themes that Zielony explored in his photo series “Maskirovka,” for which he recorded Kiev’s underground queer techno scene in various states of disguise and display, his subjects donned masks—some pulled from flea markets, others crafted from latex and silicone by Zielony’s collaborator Suzanne Quesney. The term “maskirovka” comes from the Russian military, and it describes a doctrine of tactical deception. Zielony subverts it and applies it to those at the fringes of society, for whom disguise can mean both survival and celebration. “Masks hide identities at the same time as they create an image of another one,” he says. Presentation is something that Zielony, who addressed Germany’s migrant crisis at the country’s 2015 Venice Biennale pavilion, explores in all its forms: The ways his subjects dress, move, adorn themselves, pose, and make eye contact with the camera are all part of a charged, multifaceted performance. “Especially for people who face discrimination or are fighting for emancipation to be able to be who they want to be,” he says, “fashion is a political statement—both privately and publicly.”