Show Your Working What Benji Reid And Zana Masombuka Can Teach Creatives About Building Believable Fantasy

Creative Boom: News Photography What artists Benji Reid and Zana Masombuka can teach us about building believable fantasy London's October Gallery pairs two photographic artists who constructed their imaginative scenes by hand—not afterwards on a screen. Written By: Tom May 12 August 2026 Light Bike, 2021, by Benji Reid Walk into most creative agencies tasked with producing a "surreal" or "dreamlike" campaign image, and you'll find someone muttering about compositing in post. Clouds get painted in, wires get cloned out, seams vanish. Because the whole point of illusion is that you're not supposed to see how it was done.

Benji Reid and Zana Masombuka, however, take the opposite approach. At October Gallery this September, the two photographic artists share not just a building, but a stubborn insistence that the craft should be visible. Benji's men float on clouds made of stuffed cotton wool, held aloft on wooden rigs you can see if you look for two seconds longer than intended. Zana's subjects wear their symbolism in beadwork, dye and costume that's been built, sewn and worn. Neither artist is hiding the join. Both make a strong argument for why creatives shouldn't either.

The joy of pretending Benji calls his practice "choreo-photolism": a blend of 'choreography' and 'photography'. It's a term he invented, because nothing else quite covered it. To be clear, he's not a photographer who occasionally stages performance; he builds performances that exist purely to be photographed. He then captures them, often as elaborate self-portraits, in poses that defy what you might expect a body to do. In The Proposition, he perches on a stool bolted to a bare wooden crate, dangling a toy pigeon on a lead like some airborne pet.

In Going Home, he crouches on a cloud of visible cotton wool, wielding a sparkler and a canoe paddle, feet pointed like a diver mid-flight. Importantly, there's no attempt to convince you this is real. The props are clearly props. Benji isn't selling the illusion of levitation, but the feeling of it: the sense of a man briefly unburdened, held up by will, not physics. The Proposition, 2020, by Benji Reid Going Home, 2019, by Benji Reid Untitled, 2019, by Benji Reid For anyone briefing a shoot, that's a useful distinction.

Benji's images prove you can build something entirely implausible and still have it land emotionally, so long as the internal logic of the world holds. The cotton wool cloud doesn't need to fool anyone. It needs to mean something, which is a different job entirely. Craft as content, not concealment Zana works from a different starting point, but arrives at a similar conclusion. Her heritage is Ndebele, an ethnic group found in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and her photographs use colour, beading and staged ritual not as decorative flourish but as the actual subject matter.

In Nges'rhodlweni: Is'memo 3, a figure crouches on a car roof in full ceremonial regalia, face obscured by a green megaphone and an elaborate headpiece. The construction of the latter—every bead and object chosen and fixed by hand—is the point of the picture. It's not a means to some other visual end, but an end in itself. Nges’rhodlweni: Is’memo 3, 2023, by Zana Masombuka Ubonani: iKhambo 1, 2024, by Zana Masombuka Her earlier series Ubonani: What Do You See? sets red-clad figures against the ochre rock formations of KwaNdebele, using natural pigment and hard sunlight rather than a colour grade to do the work.

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The article discusses a creative approach that emphasizes transparency and authenticity, which is increasingly important in brand strategy, making it significant and relevant, though the concept itself is not entirely new.