Elska is a project centered on traveling around the world, meeting a selection of everyday local guys, and introducing their city and their lives to readers through honest photography and personal stories. Below, photographer Liam Campbell shares exclusively with GayCities a selection of photos and behind-the-scenes commentary about some of the men he met in Munich, Germany, for the latest issue.
Alonso N Q
The arrival of our forty-seventh issue, Elska Munich, marked a long overdue return to Germany, a country we’d not featured since our second issue, Elska Berlin, first published in November 2015. Over the years, our German readership has become our second-biggest base (following the USA), so I wanted to pay tribute to them, but choosing which city to focus on was almost impossible.
One of my first steps in choosing a city was to consult our big list of future ‘models’, where we compile the contact details of people who say they’d like to be in Elska if we ever come to their city. One of the guys on that list was Alonso, a native of Costa Rica who’d been living in Munich to study dance. His enthusiasm to take part in Elska was perhaps the greatest of all the guys on our list, and that won me over and made me choose Munich.
When I finally met Alonso, that enthusiasm continued, and we had such a fun and characterful session together. Since then he’s been in touch multiple times to say how great it would be to do another shoot one day. I’d absolutely down for that, but not in Munich. I can’t repeat cities, so we’ll just have to wait to see where Alonso ends up next, and maybe follow him there.