Raw Instinct: Abraham Saraya and the Art of Queer Desire - SNIFF Magazine 1

Mark Dunn
2025-12-17T07:34:00-08:00

The Barcelona-based photographer on leaving fashion behind, finding his fetish family, and why desire deserves a frame.

A Career Built Across Continents

Born and trained in Mexico, Saraya studied visual arts and photography in Mexico City before an early restlessness took him to Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. That European sojourn, a short season that would prove formative, exposed him to a different register of image-making. Travel photography sharpened his eye for context and environment. Portrait work deepened his attention to the person in front of the lens. Before long, the fashion industry came calling.

The credits accumulated swiftly and impressively. His work appeared in Men's Health Serbia, Men's Health Latin America, Women's Health, Revista Audi, and international publications including Facade Magazine UK, Huff Magazine UK, Dapper Tapper, and DNA Magazine Australia. He shot campaigns for fashion labels and worked with agencies including Ogilvy & Mathers, Grupo Romo, and Edelman. In Mexico, he was the official photographer of Fundación UNAM, producing portraits of the entrepreneurs and politicians who sat on its board. He photographed Mexican actors and international names, Grant Bowler, Freddie Highmore, Ludwika Paleta, for Universal Mexico and major print outlets.

A subsequent chapter took him to Shanghai for a year, where he worked commercially for Samsonite China, collaborated with elite modelling agencies ESEE and Elite China, and documented cultural events including Shanghai Gay Pride and the Tribal Festival of Cultures. From there to the United States, where he contributed to The Aliveness Project, both as photographer and participant, before eventually finding his way back to Europe, and to Barcelona.

The City That Changed Everything

Barcelona has long held a special place in the European queer imagination, a city where liberation is not a slogan but a lived texture, woven into its late nights, its skin-baring summers, its fluid, defiant social spaces. For Saraya, arriving in Barcelona was less a relocation than an arrival. He had come home to somewhere he had never been.

It was in Barcelona's fetish and leather scenes that Saraya's lens found its truest language. The polished, commercially-minded photography of the fashion world, disciplined, aspirational, brand-conscious, gave way to something altogether more visceral. Here, the bodies were real. The desire was undisguised. The community trusted him with its most intimate self-expression, and he responded by turning that trust into images of startling beauty and honesty.

His fetish portfolio, documented extensively at abrahamsaraya.com is a testament to the power of proximity and belonging. This is not photography made from the outside looking in, it is work made by someone who has immersed himself in the culture he documents, who understands its rituals, its codes, its tenderness and its heat.

SNIFF Magazine: A Sanctuary for the Uncensored

It is fitting, then, that when The Male Muse Publishing launched SNIFF, its audacious new title blurring the lines between queer fine art and fetish culture, Abraham Saraya was among the first voices they chose to amplify.

Described by its creators as a sanctuary for uncensored queer expression in a world still policed by censorship and conformity, SNIFF is conceived as a direct challenge to the sanitised aesthetics that dominate mainstream art publishing. Its pages contain photography, painting, illustration, and experimental work that refuses to separate the erotic from the personal, or the personal from the political.

Scent One, the debut issue, already available in both print and an expanded digital edition containing over 100 additional images deemed too explicit for print, features Saraya in extended conversation about his craft. The interview covers the arc of his career: the fashion years, the global nomad phase, the decisive turn toward fetish photography, and what it means to make art from inside a community rather than at a curious remove from it.

Alongside Saraya, the issue features Master Bearded Koldo, a revered figure in leather and BDSM communities, three original pieces of queer erotica by author Lawrence Schimel, and visual work by multidisciplinary artist J Davies, among others. Together, they constitute exactly the kind of bold, plural queer vision that SNIFF sets out to champion.

The Photographer as Witness

What distinguishes Saraya's fetish work from mere documentation is the quality of witnessing he brings to it. He is not a journalist parachuted into foreign territory, nor an outsider aestheticising someone else's subculture. He is part of what he photographs. His subjects are his people. The images carry that intimacy in every frame.
His website organises this body of work with the same seriousness brought to his fashion and portrait portfolios, fashion editorials sit alongside food photography, travel imagery, film work, and his ongoing series of fetish portraits. The breadth is telling: this is a photographer who does not partition his life into acceptable and unacceptable zones. The same eye moves between all of it. The same commitment to the human figure, to desire, to the charged moment between two people, runs throughout.
In an era when queer artists are still navigating the contradictions of visibility — celebrated in galleries, censored on platforms, welcomed in some contexts and suppressed in others, Saraya's insistence on making work that is unambiguously, unreservedly itself carries its own kind of political charge.

Why It Matters

SNIFF is not the first queer erotic magazine to stake out territory against censorship and respectability politics, and Abraham Saraya is not the first photographer to follow desire into the darker, more honest spaces of queer life. But the conversation between his practice and this platform feels particularly well-matched: a magazine that refuses apology, and a photographer who has built his career on exactly the same refusal.
As Scent One makes its way into the hands of readers in print and digital form, it carries with it something increasingly rare, work made without the anxious calculation of what platforms will allow, what advertisers will stomach, what algorithms will reward. Work made, instead, from the inside out: from community, from desire, from a commitment to the idea that the erotic life deserves the same careful, loving attention as any other.
Abraham Saraya has been making that argument with his camera for years. SNIFF is, in its way, making it with every page.

Abraham Saraya's portfolio can be found at abrahamsaraya.com