JULY 2026 IN REVIEW

July belonged to water and to the light that moves through it. The month opened on the French Atlantic at low tide, where Martial Lenoir followed Trixie across mirror-smooth sand in "La Danse de la Sirène des Sables", and closed a few hundred kilometres south, on the white salt hills of the Camargue, where Emmanuel Grignon set Irina Lozovaya against a billowing sheet of obsidian chiffon in "Sal Y Sol". Between the two, Joakim Karlsson found the same unhurried heat beside a Balinese pool with Anna, and Richard Stow took it under the surface entirely: in "Underwater", Nancy Torija does not move through the water but with it, wrapped in drifting silk the colour of coral.

Indoors, the month turned quieter and more deliberate. Max Zadorozhnii photographed Lyuba among scattered blue blossoms for "Flower Fairy", a study in restraint where skin and petals hold the same fragile light, while Sacha Leyendecker used the hard geometry of a floor-to-ceiling loft in "Piacara" to let Vi Eik answer architecture with anatomy.

The month's centrepiece, though, was not an editorial at all. JULIA, the 336-page hardcover by Julia Yaroshenko and David Bellemere, was made over more than a month across Thailand, Indonesia and the Seychelles, and arrived alongside an interview in which Yaroshenko talks about what it cost and gave her to hand over control of her own image after a decade of guarding every frame. Some books are photographed, she says. This one was lived.