Merlin in Berlin

Merlin Bronques came through Berlin last weekend. Still a musician, still the way I remember him except darker, rougher. He made the underground rounds and pulled the hottest women, the craziest men, the smallest cocks—everything raw and explicit—straight into his camera. Three photo sets dropped: Undergrund, Kit Kat, Europeans Are Free.

I need to finally say this: Merlin is what I’m actually after. I want to make something like LastNightsParty. That’s been the real thing pushing me. The website is technically broken. Poorly made. But it’s so genuinely beautiful in its brokenness, so digitally perfect in its imperfection, that nothing else has ever shown me what I actually want. The Cobrasnake gets close. LastNightsParty got me.

What Merlin does—and this sounds intense but I mean it—is make something feel necessary that should feel disposable. His website looks like it could crash any day but it feels more real than anything professionally designed. He’s shooting people at their most defenseless. Drunk, sweating, half-naked. And he’s not making it grotesque or precious. He’s just making it matter. Making the night feel like the only thing in the world.

I think about that all the time. How he pulls it off. How to make something sloppy read as more true than something polished. How to photograph desire and intoxication and bare bodies and make people care about what you’re looking at instead of judging what they’re seeing.

Someday I’ll make something like that. So technically broken it becomes beautiful. Where people forget to check if it’s built right because they’re too busy wondering what happens next.