“I would photograph everyone naked if I could," Zora Sicher confesses. "It's people in their truest, most primitive form." Over the past decade, the 29-year-old has shot many a nude—a selection of which she shares exclusively with CULTURED.
The Brooklyn native didn’t grow up with a camera in hand. Instead, she began her creative career painting, drawing, and performing on her home borough’s tween punk-band circuit. Eventually, a growing interest in observing and documenting other people brought her off the stage and into the darkroom. Before Sicher had even graduated from high school, she’d interned for Ryan McGinley and Mario Sorrenti, and in the years since has turned her diaristic lens on the likes of Playboi Carti, Chloë Sevigny, 070 Shake, Lily-Rose Depp, and most recently, Paloma Elsesser. (She and Elsesser collaborated on Treasure, a book documenting the model’s two major breast surgeries.)
In her work with fashion houses, the photographer has captured clothes in all of their complexity, but in her personal practice she’s more inclined to stage friends and acquaintances in varying states of undress. Her interest in seizing these moments is almost anthropological: “It’s never as simple as a nude,” she explains. “It’s what you do with your body, how you manipulate it—whether that’s with a tattoo, a surgery, or a pair of pants.” As she puts the final touches on a forthcoming debut monograph, Sicher sifted through her archive to find snapshots that best illustrate her cautious yet curious gaze. The result is a billet-doux to the way her subjects witness themselves—and each other.
