Vetor Interviews: Michele Baron

There’s a fragile kind of beauty in what’s left behind — in the gaps, in the silences, in the bodies that keep going, even after. When I first met Michele Baron, there was something suspended in the way he spoke — as if every word carried the weight of what’s no longer there, and at the same time, a quiet insistence on rebuilding.

Text and interview by Valentina Parati

Photography by Michele Baron

He doesn’t just photograph bodies — he works with what remains. That’s where his gaze begins: in an afterlife that isn’t an end, but a beginning. Not a ghost, but a possibility.

Born in Padova and now based in London, Michele has been documenting queer nightlife since 2016, both in Italy and the UK. But his lens doesn’t chase glitter or spectacle — it lingers in the quiet spaces in between: the moment before the pose, the shadow behind a neon-lit gaze, the afterimage of a look held too long.

“I’m not really interested in staged beauty,” he tells me. “I’m more drawn to something that feels lived-in, slightly broken maybe — but honest.”

What started as something casual — taking pictures while out with friends — quickly grew into a form of archiving, of witnessing. As he immersed himself in queer scenes across London and Berlin, photography became a method of preservation. “There’s a kind of generosity in those spaces,” he explains. “People dressing up, creating entire characters just for one night. It’s a kind of ephemeral art form. I will try to capture it before it disappears.”

Photography by Michele Baron

This instinct echoes McKenzie Wark’s Raving, where she describes rave spaces as “temporary autonomous zones” — fragile, fleeting, yet charged with political and emotional intensity. For Wark, raving is not just nightlife, but survival. A trans and queer space of repair, of unregulated presence. “Raving is a way to be in the world differently,” she writes, “when the world doesn't want you.” That same energy pulses through Michele Baron’s work: the urgency to archive what might otherwise vanish.

There’s also a visual lineage that connects his work to photographers like Larry Clark and Wolfgang Tillmans. From Clark, there’s the rawness — the unapologetic intimacy, the sense that the camera is not just observing, but inhabiting the scene. Like Kids or Tulsa, Michele

captures youth and marginality not as subjects, but as collaborators in risk.

From Tillmans, there’s a queer softness — the ability to hold contradiction in a single frame: fragility and force, eroticism and mundanity, intimacy and distance. Michele’s photos feel like a night lived from the inside, not for the gaze of an outsider.

Rather than emulating these predecessors, Michele seems to echo them — extending their legacy into new spaces, new scenes, new urgencies. His images don’t aim to document a moment as much as to feel it — its texture, its rhythm, its breath.

Photography by Michele Baron

The word he returns to again and again is documentation. Not in a journalistic sense, but as emotional mapping. His images — often shot on analog film, sometimes blurry, frequently touched by grain — resist digital perfection. “I love the tension of not knowing how it will turn out. The delay between shooting and developing. It makes the moment stretch.”

This refusal of immediacy is part of a larger instinct: slowness, intimacy, care. In his world, the afterlife is not a fantasy of rebirth — it’s the real, raw state of continuing. “I think about nightlife as a place of collective survival,” he says. “Especially for queer bodies — we go there not just to dance, but to exist in ways we can’t elsewhere. It’s joy, but it’s also a memory. Grief. Sometimes even anger.”

Photography by Michele Baron

We talk about consent, vulnerability, and the ethics of photographing people in moments of openness. Since the pandemic, something has shifted. “Before, I used to just bring my camera and shoot. Now, there’s always this moment of hesitation. People are more aware. And I respect that — but it also changes the rhythm of how I shoot.”

He describes his process like a dance. If he knows someone — a friend, a collaborator — he might shoot candidly, instinctively. But with strangers, it’s slower. “I don’t like to direct too much,” he says. “I don’t tell people how to pose. I wait. Sometimes I don’t take photos at all.”

One of his most striking recent works was shot during a night at Inferno, one of London’s most iconic queer club nights. “There was this moment where everything felt aligned — the crowd, the energy, the colors. People were dressed in latex, glitter, ropes — full transformation. And yet there was something deeply human in it. They weren’t hiding — they were offering something.”

Photography by Michele Baron

That offering is what his images hold onto. Not just the performance, but the cost behind it. In many of his photos, there’s tension: a beautifully made-up face slightly out of focus; a strong pose that trembles at the edges. His portraits aren’t about mastery — they’re about presence.

“I don’t see myself as an artist, really,” he confesses. “More like a documentarist. A collector of impressions.”

When I ask if he’s ever considered studio photography, he laughs. “People keep telling me to open a studio — but I wouldn’t know what to do there. I don’t want to pose people under lights and say ‘now look powerful.’ That’s not how I work. I need unpredictability.”

Photography by Michele Baron

Instead, he feels most at home backstage, at the edge of a protest, or tucked into the shadows of a club at 4 a.m. “That’s where things happen without being seen,” he says. “And that’s what I’m after.”

He shoots mostly with analog cameras — partly for the aesthetic, but also for what it withholds. “With digital, people always ask to see the photo right away. With film, I just say: sorry, it’s a mystery. We have to wait.”

That waiting becomes a ritual of trust — between him and his subjects, between the present and what it might become. When the images do appear, days or weeks later, they carry the residue of time. They’re already ghosts.

But for Michele, the ghost isn’t about absence — it’s about trace. What stays after the noise fades. What memory leaves behind.

“I think the idea of the afterlife is very real for queer people,” he says. “We’re always dealing with history — with what came before us, what was lost, who didn’t make it. So for me, photography is also a way of saying: we’re still here. And we were beautiful.”

Photography by Michele Baron

He says this not with grandeur, but with quiet certainty. His images may feel soft, almost fragile — but they’re declarations. Of joy. Of defiance. Of being seen, even in the margins.

As our conversation ends, I ask him what he hopes people feel when they look at his work.

“I hope they feel something they forgot,” he says. “Something they once lived, or almost lived. I don’t need them to understand. I just want them to feel the trace.”

Photography by Michele Baron

Michele Baron's 'After Life' was published by SMUT Press, a collective print-publishing project founded in early 2022 by Jordan Hearns & Jack Scollard. Developing from a number of collaborative projects across audio/visual, installation and publications, SMUT Press was founded to spotlight, support and commission artists to produce printed matter, with a particular focus on platforming artists who are queer identifying.