Zygmunt Bauman argued that we live today in a time of utopia's negation. According to him, contemporary society has replaced the pursuit of future ideal worlds with "retrotopias", nostalgic projections of perfection onto a lost past. But I believe utopias are still very possible today. Perhaps Bauman never encountered photography like Tyler Mitchell's, whose work demonstrates that utopia remains a living, tangible possibility in the present.

Mitchell speaks of photography as a space to dream, but more than that, as a means of making dreams visible and real. His images, often depicting Black bodies in serene, joyful, or fantastical settings, are not escapist fantasies, they are affirmations of the possibility of beauty, softness, and dignity in the here and now. As Mitchell himself puts it, utopia is not confined to a distant or uncertain future; it can be accessed, created, and experienced in the present.

Personally, I see utopia as a dream enacted in the present. The utopias I construct through photography are not awaiting some impossible island in the distant future to become real. As Tyler Mitchell suggests, photography offers a way to make dreams tangible, here and now.

For me, one of the most relevant questions about utopia is not what it promises for the future, but rather where it originates and what compels us to seek it. I understand utopia less as a blueprint for a new world, and more as a form shaped by memory, a response to the need for freedom. This longing is often bound to the desire to transcend negative memories, whether rooted in lived experience or cultural imagination. In this sense, utopia is not born from futurism but from a past that aches for resolution. Art, and photography in particular, becomes a way to mediate this process, to give utopia a form in the present.

Utopia doesn't require a fixed place. In a study on the painter Henry Scott Tuke, Michael Hatt suggests that Tuke's paintings offer not just images, but worlds—for the bodies he paints, for his own desires, and for those of his viewers. These are not imaginary islands but carefully constructed "mise-en-scène" set in identifiable places, such as the shores of Cornwall.

This ties closely to Michel Foucault's idea of heterotopia. Unlike utopias, which are abstract and non-existent, heterotopias are real spaces, "counter-places" that mirror and contest our everyday environment. Tuke's settings are not arbitrary backdrops but heterotopic environments: real locations imbued with symbolic, affective, and erotic charge. They provide space where desires can be staged and seen, without the need to escape into fiction.

Something similar happens in the photographs that George Platt Lynes and the Pajama group created in the 1940s, particularly in the series of images taken on Fire Island. Through their lens, the island itself is transformed into a heterotopia. Over several summers, they staged photographs on New York beaches and in coastal homes—real, identifiable locations. Yet the places they depict feel suspended between reality and fantasy. The landscapes exist, but the worlds they suggest perhaps do not. Like Tuke and Mitchell, Lynes and his circle constructed scenes suffused with longing, desire, and a sense of freedom, utopian not because they depicted an impossible future, but because they evoked a space more dreamed than real.

These images do not simply document but dramatize. They blur the line between memory and imagination, between the actual and the ideal. Through carefully staged compositions, they conjure a fragile but powerful elsewhere anchored in specific settings yet reaching beyond them.

The photographs created by the Pajama group were probably not originally intended as works of art, but rather as a "mise-en-scène" of their own lives, a playful and intimate enactment of their complex personal relationships with love, desire, and emotional entanglements. These images were as much about staging themselves as they were about staging a world, an experiment in living and longing, captured in visual form.

But their utopias were not revolutionary in a political sense, but reformist within a specific social world they inhabited. This distinction is important: they helped build a visual culture that resonates today, but their aspirations were not oriented toward the democratization of desire or universal freedom. Instead, they sought to carve out spaces of freedom, intimacy, and pleasure within the limits of privilege. These were utopias designed for those who already had access to certain forms of power, education, and mobility.

Something similar can probably be said about my own photography. There is a memory and a context behind the images I create, one that may make sense only to me, or perhaps to a larger or smaller group of people with whom I share personal, social, or ideological connections. That memory and context shape the narratives I am able to construct in order to pursue the dream that every utopia embodies: the longing for some form of freedom.

When Pedro Almodóvar was promoting his film Pain and Glory, a journalist asked him if the story had autobiographical elements. Almodóvar replied no, that what happens in the film did not happen to him, but "it could have happened to him." That possibility without actuality, that could have happened, is, to me, a true foundation for utopia. Not because it tells us what is real, but because it reveals what we needed to feel real in order to survive, imagine, and move forward.

In my photography, when I reflect on a past that never happened, but could have, it is the present that truly matters. In utopia, the past and the future are not opposites, but twin sources of emotion and imagination. Just like in photography, we can speak of pasts and futures, but both only take form at a precise and urgent moment in the present.

Every utopia carries within it a kind of urgency—just as every act of creation does. There is a need to imagine, and then a need to act, because making it real becomes the only possible path. Perhaps Zygmunt Bauman lost faith in the possibility of utopia within our contemporary world. But I still believe it's there, alive in dreams, in memory, and in every photograph that dares to make them real.