Bad Connection

This photographic series is part of an ongoing body of work in which Julie Poly explores the visual language of camouflage and masking. In this chapter, the focus shifts to toxic relationships — with others, with the self, and within mediated environments. Through staged tableaux and body-based interventions, the work traces how intimacy becomes entangled with control, suppression, and emotional disappearance. The images depict scenes of dissolution and absorption: into urban surfaces, digital noise, emotional distance, and the body’s own contradictions.

Selected works from this series were published in Ties That Bind — Fictions, Orthodoxies and Interdependencies (Fotogalleriet & FUTURES, 2024), a multi-voiced anthology that examines contemporary conditions of reciprocity, attachment, and social power through fiction, essays, and visual contributions. The book reflects on codependence and dissonance in intimate, state, and digital contexts, and positions photography as a space where these tensions are both performed and reimagined.