SHINE
Portraits in Queer Resilience, Embracing New Dimensions
Photographs by Asafe Ghalib
With an introduction by Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin
| Brazilian-born, London-based photographer Asafe Ghalib (they/them) unveils Shine: Portraits in Queer Resilience, Embracing New Dimensions (The New Press, December 2025), a deeply personal collection of photographs exploring the lives of LGBTQIA+ immigrants in Britain. Through approximately seventy striking black-and-white, sepia, and color portraits, Ghalib celebrates resilience, visibility, and belonging among those who live at the intersections of queerness, migration, and identity.For Ghalib, this project is rooted in lived experience. Raised in a religious family in Brazil, they left their homeland in search of self-expression and safety. Their photographs—reminiscent of black-and-white newspaper photography and classic portraiture—depict friends, artists, and community members, each image serving as both confrontation and celebration. “My work aims to capture people within a historical context in order to bring awareness to the long-resisting and historically misrepresented Queer community,” writes Ghalib. “It is important to me that my work provokes, informs, and creates a safe space for the viewer through the exploration of identity.” |
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| Shine joins Diverse Humanity, a groundbreaking photobook series from The New Press, created in collaboration with the Arcus Foundation and Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios. The series highlights the global breadth of LGBTQ+ lives and the many ways communities have redefined belonging across borders. In keeping with this mission, Shine turns its gaze to queer immigrants in Britain—people whose search for safety and freedom often begins in exile. Through the images in this book, Ghalib invites viewers to confront prejudice and to see immigration not as division, but as an affirmation of human dignity and the right to self-expression. |
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| Alongside the predominantly monochromatic sepia and black-and-white photographs that anchor the book, Shine also includes Ghalib’s editorial collaborations with queer magazines and campaigns in vivid color. These works, while produced in professional contexts, retain the intimacy of the artist’s earlier self-initiated series Immigrants, which began in Ghalib’s own living room. “Even when working within the frameworks of campaigns or facing editorial constraints, I tried to remain firmly grounded in my core vision,” they explain. “Each and every shoot has been a true celebration of queer presence, expression, and solidarity.” |
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| Most of the portraits in Shine focus on a single subject, each image a study in individuality and emotional truth. “I mostly photograph individuals by themselves in order to allow their personality to emerge in full bloom,” Ghalib notes. In their accompanying essay, Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin (they/them), an LGBTQ+ rights campaigner and author of Roses for Hedone, situates Ghalib’s work within a long lineage of queer visual storytelling, describing it as a practice that holds both defiance and tenderness—revealing figures who inhabit the space between vulnerability and strength. Their subjects, “Black and Brown queers, fat beings and butch dykes,” embody a radical beauty that challenges white supremacy and the patriarchy. “For a people marginalized and erased,” they write, “a photograph is much more than a 2-D snapshot of a moment in time. It’s a form of protest, a bold claim to the fullness of our beings.” Through the lens of heterotopia, they describe the image as a portal between worlds—one that mirrors, distorts, and reimagines reality to make space for liberated futures. In today’s climate of escalating anti-immigrant sentiment and ongoing attacks on queer and trans rights worldwide, Shine stands as a necessary intervention. As Maheshwari-Aplin observes, the word “alien,” once enshrined in U.S. law to describe noncitizens, “is now recognized as dehumanizing language that stigmatizes migrants and refugees.” Against this backdrop, Ghalib’s photography reclaims humanity through visibility, insisting on the dignity of those too often erased—queer, migrant, othered—and celebrating their power to imagine and inhabit new worlds. |
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| The LGTQ Collection from The New Press: Solace: Portraits of Queer Chinese Youth by Sarah Mei Herman / Belonging: Portraits of LGBTQ Thailand by Steve McCurry / Two Women in Their Time: The Belarus Free Theatre and the Art of Resistance by Misha Friedman with a preface by Masha Gessen / Lived Experience: Reflections on LGBTQ Life by Delphine Diallo / This is How the Heart Beats: LGBTQ East Africa by Jake Naughton and Jacob Kushner) / Dark Tears: LGBTQ Resilience in Latin America by Claudia Jares / Lives in Transition: LGBTQ Serbia by Slobodan Randjelovic / Revealing Selves: Transgender Portraits in Argentina by Kike Arnal / Pride and Joy: Taking the Streets of New York City by Jurek Wajdowicz / Delhi: Communities of Belonging by Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh / Edges of the Rainbow: LGBTQ Japan by Michel Delsol and Haruku Shinozaki / The Kids: The Children of LGBTQ Parents in the USA by Gabriela Herman / Out: LGBTQ Poland by Maciek Nabrdalik / Lyudmila and Natasha: Russian Lives by Misha Friedman / Five Bells: Being LGBT in Australia by Jenny Papalexandris / Believable: Traveling with My Ancestors by Lola Flesh / Ordinary People: Portraits from LGBTQ Armenia, Georgia, and Russia by Ksenia Kuleshova. About the Author: Asafe Ghalib (they/them) is an artist from Brazil and has been based in London since 2013. They work primarily with the medium of photography in collaboration with the LGBTQIA+ community. Their work has appeared in The Guardian, Vogue Australia, Dazed, Perfect Magazine, Gay Times, and a range of other venues. The photobook series is the result of a unique collaboration between the Arcus Foundation, Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS), and The New Press. Shine is designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios. |