That August Thing

On a brutal August afternoon in Tel Aviv, photographer Michael Ivnitsky and model Shay Ri had figured out the formula: borrow a friend’s apartment, camp next to the air conditioner, get drunk, play Mac DeMarco, discuss which people the world would genuinely be better off without. If you’re working together, that’s when you make something worth seeing.

They’d been crossing paths for a while—clubs, concerts, mutual discovery of a sense of humor that empties rooms. A year had passed since they last shot together. New tattoos, new failures, the standard amount of damage. When they ran into each other again, they didn’t overthink it. They made it happen.

What came out was photos that had an ease to them. Not the posturing of model and photographer, just two people actually having fun instead of performing it. That afternoon—someone’s borrowed living room, the heat trying to kill you outside, both of them progressively losing their minds—that was the real studio. Some creative work only exists like that. You don’t build it. You show up with the right people and enough recklessness to follow through.