A new book celebrates the compelling photography of Gabriel Moses

The first time I met Gabriel Moses in person was at an after-party, somewhere in east London, sometime in 2021. Unmistakable in his black goggle beanie yet completely unassuming in a room full of inebriated industry folk. You’d never have known he had, a year earlier, aged 21, procured the title of the youngest photographer to shoot a Dazed cover when he photographed Pa Salieu for the AW 2020 edition. 

It’s been awe-inspiring to watch his ascent in the short years that have followed. To be propelled into the stratosphere of fashion, art, and music while remaining grounded is a feat most would fail. Moses has won the hearts of those many would consider idols: Nick Knight, Matthew Williams, Skepta, and more. But these three, in particular, speak intimately about their admiration for the South London phenomenon in Regina, Moses’ debut monograph, which coincides with an exhibition of the same name that opened at London’s 180 Studios last year.

One year on, Moses remains at full speed. A recent Instagram story featured him and Travis Scott posing together, having just this week released the music video for the rapper’s track “FE!N”, which Moses, who Scott calls his ‘twin’, directed. Scott recently also acquired a larger-than-life-sized print from Moses. The same picture graces the cover of Regina: a heavily pregnant woman, her rounded belly luminous amongst her darkened surroundings, blowing a pink bubblegum bubble and twirling her hair.

This is perhaps the most symbolic in the Regina universe: a figure who is at once girl and woman, child and mother. An amalgamation of the feminine guidance that Moses whole-heartedly attributes his glory: his mum, grandmother, sister, and nieces. Regina is an ode to them, telling Dazed last year: “I’ve always had a huge respect for the women in my life and the role they’ve played in everything about me: the way I speak to people, the respect I have for others.” It’s no surprise that the title Regina, meaning ‘queen’ in Latin, was chosen.

In April 2023, Regina, the exhibition, introduced Moses’ work to a broader public who had perhaps been unbothered by, or unexposed to, the fashion magazines or brand campaigns that had helped make his name. In its three-week run, hordes of people descended from the central London sidewalk into the black-painted subterranean of the Brutalist building of 180 Studios. There, through 50 works, from photography to film, including the debut of IJÓ, a moving portrait of young ballet dancers in Lagos, Nigeria, Moses transported us into the artistic liminal space he evokes. Published by Prestel, the monograph now offers a take-home version of his creative mind. 

Moses’ world-building begins at the intersection of his Nigerian heritage and a south London upbringing. Occasionally, his mono-colour, saturated pictures appear like apparitions, ghostly disruptions caught on film; some like tableaux or scenes from a lost film; others erupt like a fever dream of sumptuous, moody reds, greens, and blues. While this can be put down to pure imagination, it is, in fact, rooted in the real. Moses finds great influence in the studio portraiture of Malick Sidibé and the documentary works of Gordon Parks, but a 17th-century inspired A-COLD-WALL campaign from last year could be at home in the famous Uffizi gallery.

But rather than referencing art or photo history explicitly – which, admittedly, a self-taught Moses has only begun studying – it’s his own memory that he pulls from. Whether rifling through his grandmother’s black and white family pictures, remembering his mother running art workshops at church, or being transported back to his youth, playing PlayStation in his sister’s bedroom, its walls plastered in pages torn from 00s magazines. “I want my work to have a sense of timelessness – in that it could have just as easily been shot in 2023 as it could have been shot in a completely different time period,” he told Dazed. This ability to collapse time and space makes his work so intoxicating.  

Regina, the monograph, contains interviews with the aforementioned cultural idols and texts of admiration from friends, like artist Olaolu Slawn, Corteiz-founder Clint, and Places & Faces frontman Ciesay, campaigns and shoots for Louis Vuitton, Vogue, and Y3, as well as unseen photographs. Moses’ rapid success is a testament to his vision and the confidence to nurture it. In a creative landscape where many are tripping over each other, where the social media-fication of photography risks mind-numbing homogeneity, someone like Gabriel Moses comes along to remind us that it’s still possible to stand strong in a world of one’s own.

Regina by Gabriel Moses is published by Prestel and is available to pre-order now.