Favorite Portraits of Women I Took in 2025

Personal end-of-year photo lists are always an exercise in vanity, and this year was no exception, except that I tried to extract something useful from the self-affirming ritual.

In the Flash is a reader-supported publication about intent and creativity in photography. To join the conversation

---

Personal end-of-year photo lists are always an exercise in vanity, and this year was no exception, except that I tried to extract something useful from the self-affirming ritual. I wondered whether dividing the work into categories might force patterns to surface, visual and conceptual, and allow me to look at my own photographs more critically, with the same detachment I bring to the work of others. Seeing my work at a macro level has always been a struggle since ego and proximity cloud judgment. What if this exercise could function as a hack, a way to understand why I photograph what I do, and why I do it the way I do.

Spoiler: It kind of worked.

Grouping images into broad categories, street, portraits of men, portraits of women, and documentary, flattened differences of subject, format, and composition and revealed the intrinsic power of individual photos along with their weaknesses. Each image had to fight for relevance, and the result was closer to a bloodbath than a victory parade.

What emerged most clearly was an aesthetic language linking the images I kept returning to. Intent consciously operates at the level of a single photograph or project. Beneath that runs a more insidious compulsion, one I am still learning to excavate and harness.

Nicole Scherzinger for Prabal Gurung, Met Gala. Celebrity shoots are engineered to be polished and tightly controlled, but occasionally an expression slips through that punctures the choreography and breaks the barrier everyone worked so hard to maintain.

King Princess for the New Yorker. Probably my favorite portrait shoot of the year. I asked Mikaela, her real name, to loosen the dress shirt down to show off the “mom” tattoo and everything clicked.

Joy Woods, a Broadway lead actress, for New York Magazine. The editors chose a different, sparklier frame, but this one feels more magnetic to me.

Shakira for Prabal Gurung. Shakira brought the energy of a Disney princess so I went with that. Pink on pink on pink.

Wendy Williams for New York Magazine. The fastest shoot of the year. I had 30 seconds with Wendy as she moved from the door to her front-row seat at fashion week. Wendy knew I was photographing but wanted me to shoot her like a paparazzi. I managed to get three frames, including one shot with a mirror fragment that became the cover.

Musician Penelope Trappes, in collaboration with music writer, Philip Sherburne. The final frame of a remote shoot in London, where Penelope lives. After photographing more straightforward portraits, I wanted to experiment with her standing behind a glass door. I never try to match musician with their music, but this one landed in the same eerie emotional register as Penelope’s work.

Coralie Fargeat, director of The Substance, for New York Magazine. I asked Coralie to look at my camera and not toward the blinding strobe my assistant was holding in the front seat. She did the opposite, turning instinctively toward the light and gasping, since the flash was brutal. Once her eyesight returned, we took more deliberate frames, but none carried the stark charge of the mistake.

Brittany Hugoboom for NZZ. Brittany is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of Evie, a conservative magazine devoted to “femininity.” I was interested in the energy she brought, part boss girl and part sex kitten, and in what would happen if I leaned into it rather than neutralized it. To test the waters, I asked if she could flip her hair back, and her agreement told me that she was willing to play.

Lencia Kebede, the Broadway star of Wicked, for the New York Times. This assignment was also my first video work, since the NYTimes now requires most shoots to include short clips. Though daunting at first, I loved doing video and snuck in this portrait in between. Now I often film brief video segments during a shoot, letting subjects settle into a rhythm that carries naturally into the stills.

Bella Meyer, for NZZ. Bella is the granddaughter of Marc Chagall and owns a flower shop in the East Village, which made the theme almost unavoidable. I wanted flowers in the frame, but not as decoration, so I pushed against them with shadows and reflections to keep the image from settling into something too literal.

Musician Avalon Emerson, in collaboration with music writer, Philip Sherburne. The fish has something to tell you. Twin Peaks fans will get this one.

Film director, Tina Romero, for the New York Times. Tina is the daughter of horror legend George A. Romero, and released her first film this year. We shot in her Brooklyn apartment, where space and options were limited, but she was willing to get strange. We pulled a mirror off the wall, and I performed a Spider-Man move to catch the angle.

The president of the Marshall Islands, Hilda Heine, for the New York Times Magazine. The only woman among a remote portfolio of six world leaders for the Climate issue of the magazine. The portraits were inspired by the hero archetypes of comic books and Lichtenstein’s graphic punch. This frame made me happy because of the necklace nested inside a circle inside a circle.

Musician Rebekka Karijord, in collaboration with music writer, Philip Sherburne. Another remote portrait since Rebekka lives in Stockholm, Sweden. It risks being too literal, given that she plays the harp, but I liked the sharp lines obstructing the face so I went with it.

Danya Taymor, American theater director, for the New York Times. Bringing in objects is tricky for the risk of becoming forced and gimmicky, but no risk no glory.

---

This year, I started making single-page galleries for every project as a way to understand how the images flow together, which colors pop, and which emotion dominates. It’s a deceptively simple exercise, but it reveals more about intent than any other trick I’ve tried, largely because the distance keeps the invested ego at arm’s length.

---

Futurism Restated, Philip Sherburne’s substack.

Wendy Williams Cover Going Viral in the Court of Public Opinion, In the Flash.

How I Created Remote Portraits of Musician Penelope Trappes — and Had a Breakthrough with Hands, In the Flash

Portraits of King Princess for the New Yorker, and How I Distilled the Final Edit, In the Flash.

---

Find me on Instagram