Dara Zine Is Just What We Need Right Now: A Joyful Celebration of Friendship

In my favorite images, Dara seems to channel Lynne Koester in a series of shots where, wearing dark shades and wrapped up, she stalks Manhattan, dramatically and fabulously enveloped in scarlet, while the humdrum life of the city’s streets plays out behind her. What results is perfect in its imperfection: They’re trying things on and trying things out, a throwback to a more innocent age where the photographer and the photographed would commune to conjure images pushed to the creative nth degree—“making images with no conditions,” as Valdez puts it.

All of this was done over the course of a year, with the entire operation, Valdez says, planned to be as spontaneous and organic as possible as the two juggled their schedules—as did hair stylist Sonny Molina, who was also heavily involved in the shooting. “It was an opportunity for us to have free rein—to be inspired and try new things, to go intuitively wherever we wanted to go,” Valdez says. “I wanted it to feel very textured, whether in the studio or outdoors, so it takes you on a bit of a journey or immerses you in a world. Sometimes we shot constantly two days in a row. I’d been inspired by how musicians will hole up,” she continued, laughing, “and do an album back-to-back.” The resulting hundreds of images were taken by their friend, the graphic designer John Patrikas, and sensitively and wittily laid out; there’s a joyful, tactile immediacy to the whole project.