Steph Wilson’s new photo book strips portraiture of its excess to capture the photographer’s artist friends in a series of intimate shoots
We see images constantly. We’re saturated with photographs, mostly mediated by the impermeable, glossy membranes of screens. It’s hard not to become desensitised as pictures inevitably lose their emotional currency in the deluge. Yet, sometimes we come across a photograph that pull us up short, demanding we stop to contemplate it; impelling us to not scroll on. Earlier this year, Raven Row held a major retrospective of the late, great Peter Hujar. Photographer Steph Wilson visited the exhibition. Then she returned for another visit. And then she returned for another visit. This encounter with Hujar’s work – with actual physical prints of his photographs, rather than digital facsimiles – would galvanise her to create her debut photo book, Gilded Lilies.
“Hujar’s show reactivated something in me when I was feeling quite dissociated from current-day image making,” Wilson tells AnOther. “His photographs felt heavy with their presence, both weighty with the sitter’s lives – some coming to their end – as well as their humour and irreverence, as if the photographs themselves would weigh a ton to hold. The sitter’s imperfections weren’t erased but integral to the work itself. It made me know them.”
Inspired, Wilson felt a conviction to “make photography feel precious again; to restore its tactility and presence when everything around us has been made inert by digitalisation and AI”. The concept was deceptively simple. Having shot with Mugler, Maison Margiela, Gucci, Versace, Simone Rocha and many more, her desire for this project was to strip portraiture of its trappings and return to its most honest and raw form, photographing her sitters without the usual studio lighting, styling and retouching. “That kind of genuine exposure feels almost forbidden now,” she says. “Revealing too much of reality has become its own transgression.”
Over a period of two weeks in the UK’s April heatwave earlier this year, she reached out to a selection of friends in the creative world, inviting them to sit for her wearing any pieces of jewellery that carried significance for them. The body of work she made in that feverish fortnight became Gilded Lilies – an intimate monograph of analogue, hand-printed “tender, mad, spontaneous” portraits accompanied by transcribed conversations that took place during the shoots. “Everyone in the book was someone I already knew, people who create meaningful, physical things with intention and devotion,” she tells AnOther. Featuring Harley Weir, Elsa Rouy, Charles Jeffrey, Michaela Stark, Michael James Fox and George Rouy, among many, many others, Gilded Lilies is a sensual exploration of personhood, the objects we adorn ourselves with, and the meaning we invest in them.
Jewellery holds a particular fascination not simply as a decorative object, but as a vessel that accumulates meaning. “When I saw those metallic glints in Hujar’s prints – a silver chain catching the light against skin – I realised jewellery could anchor these portraits without overwhelming them,” Wilson says. “It gave each sitter a point of entry to talk about what matters to them.”
While the title of the book gestures to the idea of excess – a play on the phrase “gilding the lily” – the portraits themselves address the fundamental relationship between people and the objects they hold dear. It’s materialism as sacred ritual. “I really enjoyed discovering how much jewellery functioned as biography rather than decoration,” she explains. “During the shoots, asking people about what they’d chosen to wear became a way into understanding their priorities – not just aesthetically but emotionally, spiritually. It’s an act of devotion, really. And that felt vital to honour, particularly when materialism has become something we’re meant to be embarrassed about.”
The mood of the book is deeply tender; there’s a profound sense of trust throughout between photographer and sitter. A number of the portraits are nudes, but they’re not gratuitous. Accordingly, Wilson is keen that some of the more sensitive pictures should live solely in print; they’re not destined to be disseminated lightly on the internet.
“There’s a dear friend post-cancer surgery, as well as stories shared in there that sit more comfortably on paper than screens,” she explains. “Screens can reduce things to less than they are. The internet robs things of context, and without context, images and words get distorted.”
Gilded Lilies honours the power and potency of image-making. Wilson’s portraits retain their weight and gravitas. She’s fascinated by jewellery for its potential to keep “our secrets well after we’re dead”, but with her new book, she reminds us that photographs made and handled with integrity can also be impregnated with all manner of unfathomable, dense mysteries.
The Gilded Lilies photo book and exhibition launch takes place on 23 October at Have a Butchers, London. RSVP via email at rsvp@gildedlilies.org. The exhibition runs from 24 October to 7 November 2025. The Paris launch event will be held at Pulp Studio Paris on 15 November 2025. Photo books will be available to purchase at the launch and online from 23 October, including a limited edition of 20 signed prints of Michaela Stark.
