Beneath red tinsel and in the dim glow of club lighting, six young couples kiss, each seemingly wrapped up in their own little worlds.
By Jacqui Palumbo
The intimate scene feels like a film still out of time, decade unclear, as they close their eyes and hold one another in the retro wood interior.
For the photographer Andrea Martí, who staged the scene inside of a vintage London nightlife hotspot, the point was for her subjects to yearn.
The image comes from the series “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny,” titled after the 2021 viral essay about desexed blockbuster movies led by increasingly perfect-looking leads.
“Everyone has beautiful bodies in the media, but we’re seeing all these hot people and there’s no tension here,” Martí said in a video call. “There’s no desire, yearning, anything.”
She developed her series last year as part of her graduate studies at University of the Arts London. In her research, she also kept returning to the studies that say that Gen Z is having less sex, is averse to dating and is lonelier than previous generations.
“I don’t like to make general assumptions,” she said. “I think some communities are more sexually open, but I think from my experience, there is a general sense of loneliness, and an inability to connect with other people.”
She thinks one of the core issues is the sense of perpetual optimization. “Everyone wants to be tracking their calories and looking great and having successful careers and there’s no time for sensuality,” she explained. “This is something that I return to in my work, which is sensualism as an ideology.”
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/22/style/andrea-marti-photography-kissing-snap
