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Beauty and horror

A limited preview of the context Palate can cite when answering questions from Trevor McFedries.

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Author: Blackbird Spyplane
Published: Mar 31, 2026

Our interviews with Christophe Lemaire, SC103, Cameron Winter of Geese, Ryota Iwai from Auralee, Sarah Squirm, Pusha T, Adam Sandler, Nathan Fielder, Brendan from Turnstile, Seth Rogen, MJ Lenderman, Maya Hawke, Bon Iver, André 3000, Eckhaus Latta, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, John C. Reilly, Father John Misty, Michelle Williams, Clairo, Steven Yeun, Tyler, The Creator, Conner O’Malley & more are here. Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here. Check out our monumental new list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe. We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for some one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and Etsy, and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop.

We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here. — Jonah & Erin Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Portrait by Swan Gallet Petra Collins started taking pictures as a teenager, capturing the lives of her sister and their friends in Toronto. Her photographs blurred the line between stylized artifice and documentary-style naturalism — and since the lines between artifice and naturalism tend to feel pretty blurry to most teenagers, that only deepened the feeling of emotional and psychological power in the work. In the 2010s, Petra moved to New York, showing pictures at art galleries while posting them to Instagram, shooting magazine covers and luxury-fashion billboards, helping to develop the look of the epochal HBO zoomer drama Euphoria, directing music videos for pop stars, and putting out a series of cult-adored photo books.

She’s done as much as any other photographer to hash out a distinctly “millennial” aesthetic, and she has a legion of imitators to prove it. Photos by Petra Collins from between 2008 and 2015 Across it all, she’s explored increasingly slippery ideas about intimacy and performance, truth and fantasy, beauty and horror. These tensions animate Petra’s newest book, Star, which imagines the troubled lives of a group of fictitious pop stars, their friends, their fans, and their stalkers — a movie, of sorts, broken down into its individual frames. The other day I (Jonah) was stoked to get on the Spyphone with Petra to talk about the molecular-level swag of people who know how to dance; why she used to love selfies, and why she was wrong to do so; what Wim Wenders taught her about photography; and other “unbeatable topics.

A still from the Spyphone conversation Blackbird Spyplane: You were a dancer before you were a photographer. I’m always fascinated by the command dancers have over how their bodies signify. There’s this sense of molecular-level deliberateness to how they move, and how they hold themselves — whereas I feel like I’m non-verbally telling people all kinds of s--t about myself, through the way I carry myself, that I have no control over. Are there lingering effects of dance on the way you move and inhabit your body, moment-to-moment? Petra Collins: “Oh, yeah. It helped me with photography, for one thing, because I’m so aware of how the body looks in motion.

And it kind of helped me even more behind the camera, because, in a way that’s hard to explain, it helped me to understand where to put the camera in space. Two pictures from Petra’s Why be you, when you can be me? (2019) “But it’s funny you say that, because the reason I had to stop dancing is that my body basically couldn’t hold itself together. My joints and ligaments are super loose, and I have no proprioception, meaning my brain can’t really comprehend where my body is, because it’s so loose. The way I live, day to day, I don’t know where my limbs are in time and space.

I stopped dancing because I’d be dislocating my knees every couple weeks, and maybe 6 months ago I was just walking to a meeting, I stepped off the sidewalk, and I herniated a disc in my back. So in my case it’s kind of the opposite of what you’re saying. But it does end up making you super ” Blackbird Spyplane: I was reading an old interview with you where the topic of selfies arose, tied up with the rise of Instagram. You said you initially saw selfies and social media as good things, because “a lot of people who never had the ability to create, or even see, images of themselves could finally do

” Looking back, do you think you were wrong? Petra Collins: “ Totally. I’m not a techno-optimist anymore. But back then there was this feeling of hope and excitement at the beginning of any kind of technology. Like, I remember getting dial-up internet and saying, ‘This is amazing, there’s so much I can do with ’ But I saw really quickly that, if we’re talking about young women taking images of themselves, the misogyny is so baked in, you can’t escape it. I realized it was not this new dawn of imagery I’d thought it

” A picture from Petra’s old Selfie series, which she began in 2013 Blackbird Spyplane: That might have been the last time when a majority of us still saw technology as liberatory. Now technology feels mostly like the prerogatives of capital working through us, looking for new markets, annexing us, making everything worse. Petra Collins: “ We’re at the worst stage of it. We’re like 90% in here [taps phone], and we’ve almost fully lost touch, to the point that we’re actually changing the way we look so we can look more like our own

” Blackbird Spyplane: Your new book is about pop stars, fans and stalkers, and it takes inspiration from the 2000s pop culture you grew up with. How was that time different from now, as relates to fame and fandom, and what hasn’t changed? Petra Collins: “The book’s not really a period piece, but it takes that era, and this era, and brings them together. Back then, the tabloids were really crazy, there was a newer access to celebrity, and a newer obsession with it.

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