Meet the photographer turning everyday moments into fashion images.
The Chinese photographer and visual artist Xueling Chen has won the inaugural Pull&Bear Prix de la Photographie de Mode at the 41st Hyères Festival, putting her distinctive visual universe in the spotlight. Working between Europe and China, Chen explores identity, urban life and the emotional traces people leave on the places they inhabit. Her photographs feel like fragments of a memory you can’t quite place: intimate, spontaneous and full of atmosphere.
Her secret? Forget the idea that every fashion image needs to look impossibly polished. Chen often works with CCD cameras, using direct flash, saturated colours and grainy textures to create images that sit somewhere between digital photography and analogue nostalgia. The result feels immediate and tactile, like stumbling across someone’s camera roll and discovering a whole world hidden inside it.
With a background in independent fashion photography in Shanghai and an MA in Fashion Image from Central Saint Martins, Chen has been developing her visual language since 2017. Her work moves between the personal and the collective, capturing fleeting moments, everyday connections and the complicated relationship between identity and belonging.
And this award is only the beginning. Alongside €20,000 in prize money, Chen will develop a photographic project for Pull&Bear, present a solo exhibition at Villa Noailles during next year’s festival, publish a fanzine and create a limited-edition T-shirt as part of the Pull&Bear × The Photographer Project. The initiative aims to give emerging image-makers a platform that extends beyond the festival itself.
The inaugural edition of the award brought together ten international photographers, each selected for the distinctiveness of their visual universe: Honglin Cai (China), Xueling Chen (China), Giulia Frigieri (Italy), Lorane Hochstatter (Switzerland), Jay Ng Yun Ki (Hong Kong), Zacharie Lewertoff (Switzerland), Motoki Nakatani (Japan), Julien Rahmani (France), Sidonie Ronfard (France), and Valeria Sarto (Italy–United States).
Chen stood out in a competition celebrating new perspectives on fashion imagery. Sometimes the most interesting thing about fashion isn’t the clothes themselves, but the people, places and feelings caught somewhere in between.
