Chrissi, After Last Call

Hamburg has a specific kind of person you only meet after midnight in a bar you didn’t plan to visit. Someone with a story you weren’t expecting, and you’re suddenly very awake. The city runs on that energy—people who are maybe not as lost as they look, who just want to be somewhere worth being. Chrissi is exactly that.

Photographer Maria Kotylevskaja caught her first, shooting her for Apple Pie Magazine. The whole thing came together fast: they’d only messaged on Instagram beforehand, met right after Chrissi’s shift ended, and fifteen minutes after saying hello they were standing in tall grass shooting before the sun went down. Kotylevskaja works toward naturalness—barely touching her digital work in post, leaving her analog photographs entirely alone—which means she needs the right person in front of the lens. From the images, Chrissi clearly understood that without needing it explained.

She’s into vintage men’s magazines from the seventies, cats, Vietnamese food, good books, and—by her own cheerful admission—men who aren’t particularly nice to her, because the nice ones she doesn’t even register. She also likes good sex. There’s a specific kind of self-awareness in listing all of that in the same breath, and she seems completely at ease with whatever you make of it.

Her Hamburg itinerary: a show at the Hafenklang, drinks at Bar 439, then the Komet to dance until something gives. If you end up next to someone genuinely worth talking to anywhere in that sequence, finish the night with a walk through the Hirschgarten. Which sounds, honestly, like exactly the right way to end things.