PRETTY BOY presents a selection of photographs made by Josie Borain between 1983 and 1989, during a period in which her public image as a global fashion figure ran parallel to a serious, largely unseen photographic practice. Produced while she was living and working in New York and Paris, the works move between street photography and intimate cultural interiors, capturing the grit, volatility, and creative charge of the city in the late 1980s. Shot primarily on 35mm film, the images are unsentimental and psychologically alert, attentive to fleeting encounters, unguarded moments, and the texture of urban life rather than spectacle or performance.

While Borain was widely regarded as a muse within the cultural world she moved through, these photographs quietly invert that dynamic. The camera becomes a means of authorship and agency, allowing her to move fluidly between visibility and anonymity, observer and participant. Across portraits, street scenes, and self-portraits, PRETTY BOY reveals a photographic voice grounded in restraint, reciprocity, and presence. Drawn from an extensive archive and presented here as a focused collection, these works stand on their own as confident, era-defining images, marking the emergence of a photographer whose contribution to the visual history of the period is only now coming fully into view.