Queer Desire Is Hard to Hide — Meet Spanish Photographer Yandrak in SNIFF, Scent 1

Mark Dunn
2025-12-23T08:09:00-08:00

The self-taught photographer from Aragón, Spain whose lens strips away shame and turns everyday male intimacy into something worth staring at.

There is something unmistakably honest about the way Yandrak photographs men. No studio lighting designed to flatter. No posing that performs rather than reveals. Just two people, photographer and subject, arriving at something real together. It is a quality that is difficult to manufacture and impossible to fake, and it is the quality that makes his work feel like a necessary breath of fresh air in the landscape of contemporary queer photography. He was a natural choice to feature in the debut issue of SNIFF.

Born Iván, and raised in a small village in the province of Teruel in Aragón, Spain, Yandrak came to photography not through any formal training but through the oldest reason in the world: the need to understand himself. His earliest photographic work was self-portraiture, a medium through which he quietly, privately, began to explore his own relationship to the male body. That introspective beginning left a permanent mark on everything that came after.

"Creativity and the drive to learn new things were always present."

— Yandrak

A Life Held in Two Hands

What makes Yandrak's creative story unusual is the life running alongside it. By day, he works as a social worker, specifically supporting migrants and LGBTI+ individuals navigating systems that were rarely built with them in mind. The empathy that work demands does not stay at the office. It moves through everything he creates, a deeply human dimension, a refusal to reduce his subjects to bodies alone, an awareness of what it means to be seen and not diminished by the act of being seen.

His childhood was one of genuine creative range. He grew up participating in sports, music, writing, and the visual arts, guided by a mother who believed in the value of a well-rounded education and encouraged exploration without forcing a direction. That early freedom to roam across disciplines may explain why his photography now resists easy categorisation. It is intimate but not private. It is erotic but not exploitative. It is queer, unambiguously, but speaks in a register that extends beyond community into something more universal: the desire to be known.

Yandrak works primarily with non-professional models, a deliberate choice that preserves the spontaneity, vulnerability, and sincerity that define his photographic signature.

The Ethics of the Gaze

In a genre where the male nude has historically been either medicalised or made into spectacle, Yandrak occupies a quieter, more intimate register. His images are described as a celebration of everyday male eroticism, free from artifice or exaggeration. That phrase matters. Everyday. Not the extraordinary body. Not the aspirational ideal. The man next to you on a Tuesday afternoon, stripped of everything except himself.

This is the politics embedded in his aesthetic choices, even if he might resist the word politics. By casting non-professional models and prioritising the spontaneous over the staged, he is making an argument about who deserves to be photographed and how. The vulnerability of his subjects is never weaponised. It is honoured. That difference is everything.

From Self-Portrait to Community

The arc of Yandrak's practice, from self-portraiture outward to photographing other men, mirrors a journey that many queer creatives will recognise: the private working-through, the gradual readiness to share, and then the realisation that the personal was never only personal. What he was exploring alone turns out to have been something others needed to see reflected back at them.

His growing body of work has now been featured across an impressive range of publications, from DNA Magazine in Australia to Eroticco, Mascular, The Holy Art, and Falo Magazine. His prints are available for collectors, his short films on Vimeo, and his work is represented in the Queer Art gallery online. Each platform extends the reach of an eye that started, quietly, in a small village in Teruel, pointed inward.

Now: SNIFF, Scent One

SNIFF Magazine's premiere issue, this one, the one you are holding, could not have found a more fitting contributor for its inaugural pages. Yandrak's photographs understand what scent understands: that desire is not always grand. That intimacy lives in small moments. That the thing which stays with you is rarely the most obviously beautiful thing in the room, but the most truthful one.

His work in these pages is an invitation to look without looking away. To sit with what it means to want and be wanted, to exist in a body, to share space with another person. These are not complicated ideas. But they are ideas that photography rarely handles this gently, and this honestly, all at once.

Yandrak does not have a website. He exists in the scattered, human way that artists often do, across platforms, through word of mouth, through the slow accumulation of people who have seen one of his images and felt something shift. You can find his work on Bluesky at @itsyandrak.bsky.social, and everything else through his Linktree. Start there. Then stay for a while.