Late last year, photographer Tess Petronio left her home in Paris to fly to New York, where she soon joined artist Anne Imhof’s merry band of 50 or so punky performers in Doom, Imhof’s reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the Park Avenue Armory this past February. Petronio’s primary role was to…. Well, it was left open-ended; the idea was for her to simply show up with her camera and see what happens. The resulting images—off-hours portraits of the cast, dressed in their own clothes, each navigating their own New York—can now be seen in Anne Imhof’s Doom Documented by Tess Petronio, her new book (in fact, her first book ever), published by IDEA. Despite her tender age—Petronio is 21 years old—there’s a sensitivity and maturity to her accomplished image making that sees her get under the skin (in a good way) of her subjects.

“I had written a letter to Anne very spontaneously, asking if I could intern with her—however I could be useful,” Petronio tells me one recent afternoon via Zoom from Paris. Imhof was aware of the work of Petronio, who, since her teens, had been documenting the daily lives of her friends in pictures, graced with a closeness and casual immediacy, posted on Instagram. Imhof invited her to come meet her in Berlin, and before she knew it, Petronio was off to America to begin work. “I had no linear perspective on how I was going to enter Anne’s world,” she says, “other than to be there for three months during the preparation for the show and to record the process.”

Petronio, holding up a copy of her Anne Imhof’s Doom Documented by Tess Petronio, at the book’s launch at Dover Street Market in London.

Photo: Courtesy of Alastair McKimm