Warmth Without Voyeurism: Dennis Schoenberg’s Suzy

Dennis Schoenberg splits his time between Berlin and London, shooting in that particular zone where fashion photography bleeds into something more personal—subcultures, youth, beauty that hasn’t yet been fully processed by the image industry. His zine Suzy, named after one of his muses, is the kind of thing you pick up and don’t put down quickly.

His own explanation for the project has more precision than most artist statements manage: During my photography studies, they taught me there’s a distinction between nude photography and naked photography. Today, the internet confronts you with naked photography constantly. The borders between the two genres are blurring. I wanted to counter that trend by presenting a body in a way that is at once old-fashioned and modern. My goal was to create an atmosphere of warmth and romance.

That distinction between nude and naked sounds like art-school rhetoric until you look at the work and realize it actually holds up. Nude photography proposes intimacy on the subject’s terms—there’s a direction to it, a sense of negotiation between the camera and whoever is in front of it. Naked photography strips that away and leaves you with documentation. Most of what passes for erotic photography online is just naked photography with better lighting equipment.

Schoenberg is doing something different. Suzy takes you somewhere close without making you feel like an intruder for arriving there. That’s the harder trick, and he pulls it off—images that feel like they’re reaching back toward you rather than simply tolerating your gaze. There’s no cheap voyeurism here, no sense that the lens is extracting something. Just warmth, and the specific atmosphere of trust that makes warmth possible to photograph at all.