A Magazine Called Suzy

I found a magazine called Suzy not long ago and ended up spending more time with it than magazines usually get from me. Most photography that reaches for intimacy just feels voyeuristic—there’s this thin layer of shame built into the image, a sense that you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be. Schoenberg’s photographs don’t have that.

He’s a Berlin-based photographer who thinks deeply about the difference between nudity and naked photography. Nudity is just a state of the body. Naked photography is what you do with a camera to shape what that nudity means. Most images online collapse the distinction entirely—nudity becomes just nudity, photographed and exposed. Schoenberg wanted something older: to create warmth and romance around a body, to treat it as precious and looked-at rather than simply unveiled.

The magazine presents his muse Suzy across photographs that feel almost painterly in their restraint. There’s no cheap thrill, no image trying to manipulate you. Instead there’s an intimacy that doesn’t violate—you’re not voyeuristic but complicit, brought into something private without being preyed upon. The photographs hold you. You look at them and feel like you’re in a room with someone.

The restraint is what gets me. Everything’s designed to assault you now, to grab and hold and manipulate. These photographs do something different. They just exist, and they believe that’s enough. That feels almost defiant.