Full Look: Lidow Archive
When Lauren Withrow and Cameron Lee Phan create images together, the story they’re telling stretches back more than a decade. Photographers, best friends, and collaborators, the pair met in their freshman year at the University of North Texas and have been muses to one another ever since. “We've grown up together in this world,” says Withrow. “Cameron's somebody I trust wholeheartedly with my vision, and I always feel like I can get my words across best to him.”
In the early years of their friendship, they would take road trips together, photographing each other in vast, open landscapes and cheap motel rooms (an upgrade after their first-ever shoot, in an abandoned house, ended when “an old country guy came out with a gun,” Withrow recalls). That rundown, time-worn aesthetic has held a certain nostalgia for the two ever since. Withrow wanted to revisit it this year as the backdrop for a shoot that played with the concept of artist and muse—a relationship often seen as one-sided (the muse giving, the artist taking). She and Phan have a deeper mutual exchange.
