Some photographs do not reveal so much as hover. They give you a body, a room, a pool of light, a gesture half-caught in memory, then leave the rest to desire.
That suspended atmosphere sits at the centre of Christopher Barraja’s Daydreaming of Him, now on view at Saint Laurent Babylone in Paris. Curated by Anthony Vaccarello, the exhibition runs from June 3 to September 13, 2026, bringing the French-Australian photographer’s intimate visual language into the house’s cultural space on rue de Grenelle.
Barraja’s images move through identity, memory, intimacy, and desire, often filtered through Mediterranean light and the emotional codes of contemporary queer life. His photographs do not explain themselves. They linger in the space between softness and strangeness, between being looked at and being almost out of reach.
Part of that tension comes from how he uses light. In Barraja’s work, light is not just atmosphere. It becomes a material: softening outlines, shaping bodies, dissolving narrative certainty. The everyday starts to feel charged, as if an ordinary moment has been pulled out of time and turned into a private mythology.
The exhibition also marks another chapter in Saint Laurent’s ongoing expansion beyond fashion and into image culture, publishing, art, music, and design. Saint Laurent Babylone, conceived as part of the house’s wider Rive Droite universe, functions less like a conventional retail space and more like a cultural room where books, exhibitions, and objects extend the brand’s aesthetic language.
Barraja first gained wider recognition with De Chlore et de Rosé, later published by Fisheye Éditions in 2023. The project won the Picto Prize and led to his selection as a finalist at the 37th Hyères Festival in 2022, placing him among a new generation of photographers interested in intimacy not as confession, but as atmosphere.
For Daydreaming of Him, that atmosphere becomes the whole point. The work does not treat desire as something fixed or easily named. It drifts, reflects, hides, returns. At Saint Laurent Babylone, Barraja turns photography into a kind of emotional weather: queer, sensual, nostalgic, and deliberately unresolved.
Photos: Christopher Barraja