Rather than just a chance to lose one’s mind in a field, festivals can also be, for many, an opportunity to connect with others. They foster a temporary community between like-minded individuals, driven by the same drives and desires, to converge in the same strange corners of the earth at the exact same time as each other. It’s in this spirit of communality that a festival can offer an intimate experience, allowing participants to share in their escape from everyday life and imagine a more utopian way of living.

From the small, sequestered Eden-like experience offered by Ontario’s Best Out of Town Festival to the sensory overload that is Notting Hill Carnival, or the avant-garde futurism of Italy’s Kappa FuturFestival, these galleries document the diverse communities that flock to festivals in the summertime (though not always in the sunshine!).

Dwelling in astronomically expensive yurts and accompanied by the sounds of BBC Radio One, there are dark forces threatening the esoteric magic of Glastonbury festival. Fortunately, its defiant spirit lives on in Block9, situated at the heart of the festival’s radical south east quarter. The Block9 area has historically been a haven for queer and underrepresented communities. In the words of photographer Dani d’Ingeo it offers a “temporary alternative reality” where “the rest of the world doesn’t matter”.

Celebrating its ‘sweet 16’ in 2023, d’Ingeo documents Block9’s colourful lineup of “artists, drag queens, activists, go-go butcher boys and ravers” that crowned the occasion. The moment was especially potent for also representing the area’s fierce political engagement: ‘Trans Pride’ and ‘Trans Power’ signs were displayed throughout as Block9’s eclectic community weaponised their joy against the forces that seek to repress them.

In the face of skyrocketing rent in Toronto and Montreal, the encroachment of privatised land, and the commercialisation of both city’s club scenes, Best Out of Town festival offers an escape to nature for Ontario’s “dance music adorationists”. Attended by only 250 people in 2023, BOOT prioritises the subtle, intimate moments of connection over the high-octane joyrides of the larger-fuelled, profit-oriented festivals. For attendee Frank Giggs, the experience is summed up as “being seen, not watched, and revelling with calm abandon to lovingly selected songs and sounds”. 

This collection from photographer Kirk Lisaj includes one of his favourite images of 2023 – a pair of feet dangling from a hammock on the lakeside. As a gift back to the BOOT community, Lisaj is in the process of creating a zine from these images, adorned with testimonials from its guests and souvenirs picked up along the way. “I think the zine will be a beautiful artefact for anyone who attended – until the next one, when we can do it all over again”, he says of the project.

It was 2007 when New Zealand-born photographer Rebecca Zephyr Thomas first photographed Underage Festival in Victoria Park. Welcoming London’s 14-18-year-olds in 2007, the festival was designed as an antidote to the perennial FOMO of the ID-less adolescent. Thomas didn’t have a long lens at the time so, instead of shooting the acts, she focused on shooting the attendees, and ended up capturing pure moments of 00s youth culture. In one photo a teenager chugs a bottle of Coke on a collapsible chair in the middle of the park, whilst in another two girls play catch with a Converse-branded space hopper. 

Despite being in her twenties at the time, she felt “hugely sympathetic” to the teenagers. “Adults tend to romanticise the teenage years, but they aren’t an easy time,” she explains, “You are dealing with body changes, sexuality and romantic upheavals, the pressure that comes with leaving school or university and not having a choice about engaging in capitalism. They are often seeing the injustices of the world for the first time and this can be really painful.”

For one week a year in a lakeside industrial park on the fringes of Berlin, underneath giant, rusting machinery, pink cowboy hats and butterfly beard clips reign supreme. The occasion is Berlin’s WHOLE festival, home to people who are “queer, easy, thrill-seeking, horny and love to dance”, according to Stephen Stępniak who documented the festival in 2023.

Having come of age in his native Poland amid a political climate characterised by “Islamaphobia, racism and homophobia”,  the queer photographer explains that even the rain at WHOLE feels refreshingly “sensual and sensational”.  It is in this context that Stępniak’s camera became a form of protest, documenting the international queer community that populate WHOLE festival’s industrial no man’s land once a year. “I loved meeting DJs, photographing people taking showers together, bumping into friends or flirting with boys, and documenting participants in kinky poses,” recalls Stępniak of his favourite moments, “I followed my friend, taking pictures of his butt the entire time. A passing guy pulled down his underwear and screamed: ‘Better take a picture of this one!’”

Founder Grace Ladoja describes Homecoming festival in Lagos as “a movement; igniting new cultural conversation and creative development across Africa”. The event goes beyond the traditional festival perimeters to include workshops, exhibitions and even a football match designed to both showcase and connect its flourishing community of artists. 

This collection of photographs documents the full range of these activities, capturing Nigeria’s new wave of luminaries from across art, fashion and culture as they immerse themselves in both the past and the future of art and meaning-making.

Underneath the sobering remnants of Grenfell Tower, feather headdresses and paint-splattered summer clothes jostle against uniformed police officers and multi-million-pound houses in one of the city’s most culturally rich neighbourhoods (though increasingly just rich). Showcased at West London’s White City House, An Ode to Notting Hill Carnival was dreamed up by curator Rio Blake in 2021 amidst news that the festivities had been cancelled for a second year running due to the pandemic. 

Celebrating Notting Hill’s Caribbean community since the mid-60s, this series of images casts the spotlight on the overlapping chaos that makes ‘carni’ and the West London neighbourhood it’s situated in, so special. In view of increasing restrictions and endless threats to terminate the street festival, for Blake, Notting Hill Carnival “champions London for what it is – a hub that celebrates diversity, inclusivity and community”.

Over its 50-plus year lifetime Glastonbury Festival has weathered Thatchers’ Britain, countless new music genres and the pandemic, but it still remains what The People’s Archive curator Paul Wright, along with countless others, believes is the “best festival in the world”. In honour of its 50th birthday back in 2020, The People’s Archive collated images taken by Glastonbury festival-goers over the years, featuring mud, mods, hippies, punks… and more mud.

“As a celebration of the music and the arts, the festival has always had an underlying spiritual vibe to it. It’s one of those festivals you need to experience to understand it,” Wright explains. Theories range from a strong history of paganism on the Glastonbury grounds to underground ley lines; but, whatever it is, it’s powerful enough to compel people to sleep in a muddy field for a week and still call it the experience of a lifetime.

Set in the heart of Italy’s northern city of Torino, Kappa FuturFestival honours the early 20th-century Italian art movement of futurism, borne from the chaos of rapid mechanisation in Italy’s major cities. In its expressionist shapes and vivid colours, futurism evokes the incessant forward motion of industrial society that, over 100 years later, is still being celebrated in Torino. 

“This techno Mecca attracts people from all corners of the world who come together to dance and celebrate the latest DJs on the circuit in 35-degree heat,” says London-based artist and photographer Marco Walker who travelled to document the festival back in 2017. The images of the futuristic attendees that Walker captured are each accompanied by their answer to the question, “What is beauty to you?” “Beauty is watching the sunset with a woman,” says inked-up topless muse Nino Von Are from Switzerland. “Beauty is Glastonbury,” says Thomas Green, rocking a nuclear bomb t-shirt. He must have read this list. 

In a now-deleted thread on her X (formerly Twitter) account, US model Anok Yai shared details of a racist incident that took place on a photoshoot for Spanish retailer Zara. “Who wants to hear a story?” the model began on May 20, before outlining the alleged comments in the following tweets. “I remember in 2019 being called a cockroach by a photographer. It was from this brand that I used to always work with. I didn’t speak their language and they didn’t speak mine but regardless we were on set shooting look after look after look.”

Yai then went on to reveal how “on the 2nd to last day the makeup artist starts powdering my face and the photographer puts his camera down and yells ‘lotion la cucaracha’,” meaning “lotion the cockroach” in Spanish. According to Yai, after the unnamed photographer’s comment “everyone on set starts smiling and laughing.”

Just after the racist incident – which a source claims happened in 2018, rather than 2019 as Yai claimed – the model remembered feeling how she couldn’t “react the way I [wanted] to react because at the end of the day I’m young, I’m alone, I’m black… anything that I do will affect me, my family, and other black models.”

In the same thread, Yai also recalled refusing to return to set the next morning if the photographer was still present, to which an unnamed Zara team member allegedly responded, “‘we don’t accept that type of behaviour, we’ll fire him now. Tell me who he is and we’ll get rid of him’.”

Despite this promise, when Yai returned to the set the photographer “walks by me and smiles.” Someone from the Zara team is then alleged to have told the distressed model, ‘“I asked the team what happened and they said you made it up. Honestly, whenever you come here, you’re never smiling and you’re never happy to be here.”

“By now, there’s tears running down my face,” continued Yai in the tweets. “I told her I wasn’t lying, she still doesn’t believe me. But I could tell she wanted me to sit down and shut up so I forced them to call my car to the airport and pay my full rate regardless. I remember wanting to come out with the story to magazines but I was told ‘think about your career’. That was my first (and not only) time being blacklisted.”

Though Yai had declined to mention any names or brands throughout her story, she then concluded the thread with the single tweet: “Hi bitch @ZARA. Remember me?”

With many fashion brands promising to ‘do better’ when it came to diversity and inclusion in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, it may be that Zara took a look inwards and began to iron out its flaws. However, the fact Yai has chosen to speak out on this publicly suggests the industry still has a long way to go. 

Dazed reached out to Zara for comment but at the time of writing a representative for the brand confirmed it declined to comment.

To revist our winter 2023 cover shoot with Yai, click through the gallery above.

“I never felt I belonged, but I am very thankful for that,” says Argentinian-born photographer Marina Mónaco. Recalling her time in Buenos Aires and feeling like an outsider, she continues, “It’s the origin of my work – a need for belonging – that I reflect in my photos.” Now based in Berlin, Mónaco has spent recent years travelling across Leipzig, Cologne, the Netherlands and beyond, taking portraits of suburban youth cultures across Europe. “I introduce myself by saying, ‘I’m from the other end of the world’ when I meet people, so they understand where I come from.”

These travels were chronicled in Mónaco’s I saw you in a song (2023) – a photo book and exhibition exploring rites of passage such as falling in love, heartbreak, friendship and enchantment. Its recent sequel, I saw you in a song: an anti-memoir (published this month) is a continuation of these themes, bringing together the artist’s photographs of young people in European city suburbs and compiling the fragments of ephemera which inform her documentary work, such as her diaries, letters, and cassette mixtapes.

Throughout Neue Welle, the main photo series featured in both books, Mónaco developed a signature style that sits at the point where documentary photography encounters the stark aesthetic of late 70s and early 80s Berlin, drawn to intriguing transitory places such as backstage areas and motel rooms. Contemplating her outsider’s perspective of the city, she says, “Born here, I wouldn’t have been able to see it this way, not even in the former new wave scene.” Without speaking the same language or understanding the lyrics to their songs, she became close to the artists within the contemporary German new wave scene – known as Neue Neue Deutsche Welle – turning this distance into a source of inspiration for her work.  

A sense of shared references and influences allowed her photography to grow and form a joint narrative with this movement, “I think I discovered complementarity with the artists because they found in my photography the visual dimension of what they were trying to express through sound,” she explains of the raw, black and white style of photography she developed after moving to Berlin.

The series of portraits in both photo books trace her ongoing collaboration with German musician and muse Nils Keppel. “He is the artist with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working more closely,” she says. Having documented his career since the start, she reflects, “I realised how much we – and also everyone around me, my friends – have grown right after photographing Keppel’s last concert at Berlin’s SO36 – a venue where artists like Nick Cave played in the early 80s.”

According to Mónaco, trust in her intuition and collaboration is what keeps the DIY, low-fi essence of her practice intact. “I like the limited, the special,” she explains, “to know that the people who get it get it.” Reflecting on her work as a kind of ongoing manifesto or time capsule of her generation, she concludes, “You don’t think about it now, but tomorrow, who knows if even I will exist? It doesn’t matter, the book will be somewhere, telling the story of this moment.”

I saw you in a song and I saw you in a song: an anti-memoir (both edited and art directed by Sofia Mastrogiacomo and Julieta Colantonio) are available to buy here. The official launches of I saw you in a song: an anti-memoir will take place in Berlin on May 24 at Be Safe Studios and in New York on June 8 at Contact Photo.