Strong, emphatically physical, and always a bit surreal, the French photographer Maxime Ballesteros (*1984) uses analogue images to present his view of a world in which borders are dissolving and a subjective reality comes to light.

He lives to take pictures and work with his imagination. From the time he first picked up a camera as a teen, he hasn’t put it down. His photographs show a section of the world where day and night, dream and nightmare, the subjective and the objective are of equal importance. He shoots photographs in the moment, following his protagonists to parties, private apartments, and the beach at dawn—shimmering and excessive, sharp and always in style.

The striking photobook Les Absents is his first monograph, produced in cooperation with the visionary culture and fashion network Sang Bleu in London, including various texts and poems by the artist himself.