“It all started when we used to call each other and jokingly say, ‘Can you do Dara Zine?’ or ‘Are you free to do Dara Zine?’” Photographer Cruz Valdez is telling me about the, well, zine that she and the stylist and model Dara have just published. Dara Zine is a testament to a lot of things over the course of its 44 glorious pages—a kinetic and gorgeous romp of style, pose, attitude, humor, warmth, and, maybe most of all, friendship, all shot by Valdez and starring only Dara. The duo first met when they were both fashion-obsessed Southern Californian kids, style blogging like crazy and talking about where they wanted to be. (You don’t need three guesses: It was New York City.) “As they enter their tenth year of friendship, Cruz and Dara continue to make pictures”—so reads the line at the get-go of their publication, and maybe that’s why Dara Zine is so enormously seductive and charming: It’s the unabashed simplicity of two pals just creating and playing in NYC for the sheer love of image-making and their sheer love for each other.
Their zine sees Dara strike a whole bunch of looks and moods, all very Qui êtes-vous, Dara Magoo? There’s Audrey in Funny Face (cue black crop pants, black kitten-heel mules, and a LBD worthy of Hubert de G—Dara had an image of Ms. Hepburn from the movie pinned up in her bedroom); her sunshine yellow hair phase (it looked fab—poppy and TikTok-ish); Cinderella clutching a broom and bundle of her own clothes in a kaleidoscopic Comme des Garçons–esque whirl; and wearing a very Pygar-in-Barbarella spread of angel’s wings (though Valdez points out she was also thinking about icons and iconography when she took that particular picture).
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.
Of course, when you work with that level of freedom, there are things you can be intentional about, as well as other aspects that seep into the pictures because you’re creating and living in real time. Quite deliberately, for instance, the looks Dara wears aren’t at all about the power of identifiable designer labels but rather further whatever characters they could help convey. “We wanted the clothing to work to service the ideas, not to be fashion,” she says. “We didn’t want it to be, ‘Oh look, we’re doing the zine, and look at all these flashy fab clothes.’”
That was smart thinking because it allows the images to possess a certain timelessness unmoored from the typical fashion sitting, the entire function of which is so often date specific. What does date the pictures for both Valdez and Dara are the emotions of their lives and what they were experiencing as they created together. “Dara and I each had a challenging year,” Valdez says, “so this project was a space for us to express ourselves and have a respite from everything. Also,” she went on, “I’ve been challenging myself to ask, Can photography be a way to express emotion? For me, music—or writing—can feel more easily emotional, but doing these images…. I feel I’ve been able to access that—that you can take the pain or anxiety—this almost beautiful terror—and turn it into a sublime feeling.”
Speaking of feelings, what Dara Zine makes me think of is how every deeply creative person at some point—as the pressures and expectations of career and success take hold—needs to revisit, Saturn-return-style, where they started. The beauty of this zine is that two friends who found each other when they were on the cusp of adulthood had the space to create the kind of work they dreamed about making as kids. Maybe I’m making that sound sappy, but at a moment when the challenges to so many of us seem to be coming fast and furious, there’s something immensely affirming about that: It invokes a happiness that someone, somewhere out there, is doing their thing, the harsh relentlessness of today be damned. “This is the essence of what we wanted to do—create with someone you love,” Valdez says. “Dara’s my sister. She’s such an important person in my life and to my artistry. That’s the pure essence of it—just to make a book we love and be inspired by it. And it feels so amazing to be able to share it.”