ELSKA MAGAZINE MARKS 11 YEARS AND 60 ISSUES

DOCUMENTING GAY LIFE AROUND THE WORLD

This week, independent gay photography magazine Elska celebrates its 11th anniversary, marking more than a decade of travelling the world to photograph and share stories of ordinary men from local queer communities around the world.

Since launching in 2015, Elska has published sixty issues, each dedicated to a different city and featuring photographs and personal stories from a cross-section of men who live there. From Taipei and Tbilisi to Chicago and Chisinau, from Berlin and Bogotá to Mexico City and Ho Chi Minh City, the project has grown into an extensive photographic record of global queer life.

“It’s strange to think that something I started almost accidentally has now been going for 11 years,” says Elska editor and chief photographer Liam Campbell. “When I made that first issue in Lviv, Ukraine, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested in it. I didn’t even imagine I’d be doing it a year later, let alone eleven years and sixty issues later.”

Elska began as an alternative to the conventional photography world where only a tiny fraction of men — those fitting a narrow convention of attractiveness — were given space. Campbell, then working as a flight attendant and a part-time commercial photographer, began photographing people he met during his layovers. Rather than looking for professional models, he became interested in ordinary people whose looks and lives were rarely represented in mainstream media.

That principle remains at the heart of Elska today. Participants are invited not only to be photographed but also to contribute a personal story, allowing each issue to combine intimate photography with first-person accounts of everyday queer life.

Over the years, the project has also had to adapt to a dramatically changing media landscape. Several landmark LGBTQ+ bookshops, where Elska could be discovered in the wild, have gone out of business, and the media ecosystem that once helped promote independent projects has diminished. Social-media platforms have become increasingly unpredictable for photographers working with LGBTQ+ subjects. In 2025, Elska’s Instagram account, which had grown to more than 17,000 followers, was permanently deleted by Meta. The loss effectively erased almost a decade of accumulated audience, forcing the project to rebuild its social-media presence from scratch.

“Losing 17,000 followers overnight was probably the biggest reminder I’ve ever had that you can’t rely on any platform and its algorithms,” says Campbell. “It was devastating, but it also made me think about what Elska actually is. Ultimately, it isn’t an Instagram account. It’s the print books, the photographs, the stories, and the people who took part in them. Those things are still here.”

“I’m incredibly grateful that Elska has survived this long,” Campbell adds. “Eleven years is a very long time for any independent creative project, particularly one that has never had a large company or institution behind it. I’m proudest not of the number of issues, but of how many different people have allowed me into their lives and trusted me with their stories.”

Elska’s journey continues — documenting the ordinary, intimate and diverse realities of gay life one city at a time. The 60th issue, Elska Chicago, has recently been released, and the upcoming roster of editions features cities across four different continents.

Elska print magazines are available through selected stockists worldwide and from the Elska website, alongside digital editions, signed art prints, subscriptions and more.