The Santiago-based self-taught photographer Lontano has spent years working in the sharpest of contrasts, not just the black and white of his signature aesthetic, but the contrast between what desire looks like and what society permits us to show of it. His presence in SNIFF Magazine Scent 2 feels less like a feature and more like an inevitability: this is exactly the kind of work SNIFF exists to hold space for.
From the Dance Floor to the Body
Lontano's origins are in documentation of a different kind. He came up shooting the LGBTQIA+ scene in Santiago, the drag performers, the underground parties, the resilient, radiant people who built community in spaces that the mainstream pretended didn't exist. That work required a particular kind of attention: to be present without being intrusive, to honour the brilliance of people who were used to being rendered invisible.
That same quality of attention, patient, precise, deeply respectful even when confrontational, carries directly into everything that came after.
Macizos: A Cartography of the Male Form
Since 2017, Lontano has been developing Macizos, a long-form photographic project that has become his most defining body of work. The title itself carries weight, macizo in Spanish holds meanings of massiveness, solidity, the monumental, and Lontano uses the male body as both subject and terrain.
This is not the male gaze turned inward in the usual sense. Macizos is a mapping project: Lontano moves deliberately from what he calls hegemonic bodies, the culturally legible, the socially sanctioned, toward the fluid edges of non-binary identity. The camera becomes a bridge rather than a window, a tool for traversing the distance between the person looking and the person being seen.
The result is work that feels simultaneously architectural and intimate. His black-and-white images strip away colour's emotional shortcuts, leaving only form, shadow, and the raw fact of skin. Volume becomes language. The body becomes argument.
Why This Work Belongs in SNIFF
SNIFF was built on a premise that refuses to apologise for itself: that queer desire, expressed through art, is worth printing and holding in your hands. The second scent pushes further into that conviction, and Lontano's work is central to why.
His photographs don't perform queerness for a straight gaze, nor do they perform radicalism for an already-converted audience. They operate with the confidence of someone who has spent years looking carefully, at bodies, at communities, at the complicated, gorgeous mess of who we are when we're not editing ourselves for someone else's comfort.
In a landscape where algorithms constantly make decisions about what queer content is permitted to exist, there's something important about a printed magazine that simply commits. Lontano's work commits in exactly the same way.
Get SNIFF Scent 2
SNIFF Magazine Scent 2 is out now from The Male Muse Store. Alongside Lontano, this issue brings together a constellation of queer creatives, photographers, illustrators, writers, and fetish artists, all working without apology.
Follow Lontano's ongoing work on Instagram @lontanx and Bluesky @lontanx.bsky.social.
