“What if everyone started making out?” Andrea Marti’s horny photo series tackles Gen Z’s lack of intimacy head on

For some reason, it makes a lot of sense that Andrea Marti’s first foray into photography was at age 11, when she was gifted a digital camera from her family to support a fashion blog that she was deeply devoted to. “I actually only used that camera to take pictures of myself in my outfits,” she tells us. Growing up between Mexico and the US, it wasn’t until the photographer moved back to her birthplace of Barcelona that she started “taking it more seriously”, she says, and bagged herself a fancy 35mm film camera. From the age of 16 Andrea was pretty prolific with image making, capturing friends, family and everyone around her to practice the art of the portrait — all of which gradually led up to her completing an MA in Photography at London College of Communication last year.

In the run up to Andrea’s final project at LCC, the photographer had been thinking a lot about “hookup culture, intimacy and social media”, she says, which led her to embark on a series of boldly art directed, fictionalised images of young couples kissing. “The idea partly started as a funny inside joke with myself. Whenever I’m somewhere crowded, and everyone is keeping to themselves, I find myself thinking: What if everyone just started making out?” she says.

After discovering an essay by Raquel S. Benedict titled Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny, surrounding characters in film that may be presented in sexually suggestive ways but are not shown having or even talking about sex, Andrea started to think that there was even more ground for her photographic exploration of intimacy today, so she adopted Raquel’s essay title to frame her images: “I think it is an incredible title,” she shares, “one that was highly debated by my tutors, which only made me love it more.”

A big visual inspiration behind the series for Andrea was Tom Wood’s classic photographs of young people clubbing. When she first started researching the photographer, Andrea was confronted with the sad realisation that if she was to recreate Wood’s images today, the kinds of scenes he captured would probably have to be staged, as younger generations are increasingly missing out on in-person interactions, living chronically online. “My mum used to tell me how, back in her day, people would go to clubs and fall in love, and at the end of the night, the DJ would play slow music” Andrea says, “I don’t think that happens anymore.” Harnessing this nostalgia for a time she never experienced, the photographer wanted the final series to reimagine this current rise in physical isolation and declining intimacy by staging an alternative, utopic reality in which closeness and desire are visible in young people today.

All of this making out was, according to Andrea, a bit of a challenge to orchestrate. “I’d never done something that required so much pre-production and planning,” she says. “Finding couples was definitely the hardest part. It was incredibly difficult to align schedules, get people to commit and communicate my vision without coming across like a perv.” From putting up posters around uni, to messaging people on Instagram and even trying to cast some actors herself, finding participants was a logistical nightmare. “It didn’t help that most of my friends are single as well,” she says. After exhausting all her options Andrea decided to reach out to people that work in casting for help and she came to collaborate with Melissa Ozcolack on a final line up of couples willing to snog for the camera.

The final shoot took place in one venue: Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club in London. “It’s an iconic location, and it was really important to me that the styling and lighting complemented the atmosphere,” shares Andrea. “In a lot of ways, it felt like I was shooting a movie, partly because I put together a detailed shot list, which is not something I would necessarily do for every shoot.” The photographer knew from the start that she wanted to take a pseudo-documentary approach to capturing these images, allowing them to feel somewhat staged but just on the edge of ‘truth’. Everything was shot on film with limited editing to create a visual tie to the kind 80s club scenes in Tom Wood’s work that now feel quite alien to Gen Z.

One of Andrea’s images from the series, Crush, has been selected as a winner of the Single Image category for British Journal of Photography’s Female in Focus Prize 2026. It will be exhibited in London at 10.14 Gallery from 24 April to 29 May, later on this year as part of the Photo Ireland festival in Dublin in the Image Museum from 10 September to 25 October, and Andrea is also starting to work towards publishing the project as a photobook. As for future photos, Andrea anticipates a few more kissing shoots in different settings, as she continues to explore this subject matter of intimacy and isolation in her work. “I think my generation is becoming lonelier, and there are a lot of societal values being placed on becoming super efficient with our lives,” she ends. “It’s ruining our sense of sensuality and I think art, in general, is something that can help bring that back.”