International Center of Photography - Tickets to Side B
Concept Album: Photography in Writing and Curation
Online Symposium
Side B - Track 1 BEAUTIFUL MEN
Photography, Desire, and the Reimagining of Masculinity
Co-curated talk with Velina Stefanov, Artistic Director and Curator at Before Creating.
October 24, 2026
Beautiful Men brings photographers Debmalaya Ray Choudhuri and Dimitri Stefanov into conversation about how masculinity is learned, embodied, negotiated, and reimagined through photography.
The conversation moves through three interconnected ideas: Inheritance, Intimacy, and Appearance. Inheritance considers the familial, cultural, and social systems through which masculinity enters the body. Intimacy looks at what happens when those inherited structures encounter tenderness, vulnerability, desire, dependence, and connection. Appearance turns toward photography itself, asking how masculinity becomes visible and what happens when the image refuses to resolve identity into a fixed form.
Rather than proposing another definition of masculinity, Beautiful Men considers photography as a space where its expectations can become unstable and other possibilities can appear.
At the center of the conversation is a question:
Who is permitted to appear differently?
Debmalya Ray Choudhuri
Debmalya Ray Choudhuri is a nonbinary, self-taught photographer from Kolkata, India, based between New York and Calcutta. Working across photography, performance, and text, their diaristic practice explores gender, migration, memory, grief, desire, vulnerability, and forms of kinship. Their photographs often emerge through intimate collaborations in which the boundaries between photographer and subject remain deliberately fluid. Recent projects examine masculinity as socially constructed, particularly through men navigating migration, violence, friendship, and emotional restraint. Choudhuri’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Les Rencontres d’Arles, and in 2026 was featured by Photoworks through its Digital Residency and festival programming in the UK.
Dimitri Stefanov
Dimitri Stefanov is a Bulgarian photographer based in Sofia. Working primarily through long-term photographic projects, his practice moves between documentary observation and constructed imagery, exploring the relationship between personal experience and broader social and cultural structures. His work has received international recognition from Photo Museum Ireland, the Charta Award, FUTURES × VOID, PhMuseum, and Fotofestiwal Łódź. He is currently participating in PhMuseum’s CRITICAE programme with Aaron Schuman.