Archiving Desire: J Davies and the Intimate World of SNIFF Magazine's Debut Issue

Mark Dunn
2025-12-14T02:30:00-08:00

J Davies has spent years photographing life behind closed doors, and now they're writing it too. Their inclusion in Scent 1, the debut issue of SNIFF magazine, marks a natural evolution for one of Australia's most compelling queer voices: from the analogue intimacy of their photographic archive to original works of queer erotica, the through-line is the same relentless honesty that has defined their practice from the beginning.

Who Is J Davies?

J Davies is a multidisciplinary takataapui artist respectfully doing mahi on the stolen lands of The Kulin Nation in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). The word takataapui, a te reo Māori term reclaimed by Māori LGBTQ+ communities, speaks directly to the layered cultural identity woven through J's work: First Nations, agender, queer, and deeply invested in what it means to exist in community.

Their practice spans analogue and instant photography, digital and analogue-based video, poetry, and text. It is an expansive, ever-evolving archive, not just of images, but of life itself. Through ongoing documentation of contemporary queer existence in Naarm, J cultivates connection to community and culture whilst exploring themes of identity, intimacy, and neurodiversity.

What sets J apart is the radical intimacy of their gaze. Rather than observing queerness from the outside, J documents their own life behind closed doors, inviting their audience and collaborators to collectively contemplate how we view and value intimacy. Their photographs offer what the National Gallery of Victoria has described as a kind of voyeurism, audiences borne into private queer spaces, witnessing the enduring love of chosen families.

J graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017, formalising a photographic practice they had been honing since 2008. Since then, the accolades have been considerable: in 2022, they were awarded the World Centred Photography Practice Award from RMIT, shortlisted for the prestigious William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, and included in the Incinerator Gallery's Incinerator Award. In 2023, their work was selected for Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria, one of the most significant exhibitions of contemporary Australian art, as well as the Hong Kong International Photo Festival.

Dreams, Memory, and a Book That Changed Things

In 2021, J was diagnosed with a processing disorder that shed new light on their long-standing difficulty with timelines and distinguishing dreams from memories. Rather than being a setback, this became a lens, a way of understanding and articulating an already deeply personal practice.

In 2022, J published their debut book, Half of My Whole Life Was Just a Dream, through Pure Nowhere. It is an organised collection of quiet moments and radical existence, exploring the connectedness of consciousness and subconsciousness. The book emerged during a period of recovery following a severe workplace injury, a window of stillness that allowed J to sit with their archive and let something cohesive build. It has since been recognised as a landmark contribution to queer photographic literature.

Enter SNIFF Magazine: A New Kind of Queer Publication

Into this context arrives SNIFF, a bold, subversive new publication from The Male Muse Publishing, the creators of Inspiró. Conceived as a sanctuary for uncensored queer expression in a world still policed by censorship and conformity, SNIFF blurs the line between queer fine art and fetish culture. Each issue brings together a curated blend of photography, painting, illustration, and experimental modalities, from bondage and role play to leather culture, fetish gear, and beyond.

SNIFF is not interested in respectability politics. It reclaims the erotic as both personal and political, celebrating artists who work fearlessly in the erotic underground.

Scent 1, the debut issue, arrives as both a print edition and an expanded digital edition featuring over 100 additional images, content considered, in the magazine's own words, too explicit, too raw, or simply too hot for print.

J Davies in Scent 1: Intimate Narrative and Literary Seduction

J Davies appears in Scent 1 not only as a visual artist but as a writer, contributing original pieces of queer erotica alongside acclaimed author Lawrence Schimel. This dual presence is characteristic of J's multidisciplinary approach: the literary and the visual feeding each other, the personal and the erotic intertwined.

Their contribution expands SNIFF's storytelling into what the magazine describes as intimate narrative and literary seduction. For longtime followers of J's work, this feels like a natural progression, from photographing intimacy to writing it, from archiving queer life to actively constructing its fictions.

The issue also features work from artists including Greif Lazic, S4KINK, Ivan Bubentcov, Geartographe, Immortal By Nige, Orpheus, Yandrak, and Mark Alan, alongside interviews with Spanish fetish photographer Abraham Saraya and Master Bearded Koldo, a respected figure within leather and BDSM communities.

Why This Matters

There is something resonant about J Davies appearing in the first issue of a publication like SNIFF. Their entire practice has been about insisting on the value of queer life as it is actually lived, messy, embodied, intimate, and full of longing. At their core, J has described their work as being about celebrating life and remembering to romanticise it: to find fragments of lust and of love in everyday life.

SNIFF Scent 1 takes that ethos and amplifies it. It refuses the sanitised version. It says: desire is art, the body is political, and queer existence in all its forms deserves to be documented, celebrated, and distributed.

In a landscape where queer content is still routinely censored on social platforms and scrubbed from algorithmic visibility, a print publication that commits fully to this vision matters. And J Davies, an artist who has always understood that showing your life behind closed doors is an act of resistance, is exactly the right voice to help inaugurate it.

Learn more about their art at: j-davies.com.au