Zander Whalen is a photographer living and based in Brooklyn, New York, working mainly within fashion, portraiture, and fine art spaces. 

Whalen’s world is heavily influenced by his upbringing in the Appalachain Mountains of Eastern Kentucky - one filled with coal mines, churches, woods, delapidated farmhouses, and a plethora of gleaming stereotypes one can muster when imagining life in the Bible Belt. A defining part of Whalen’s upbringing was the reconcileation of his queerness and what power it often has for severing one from the outside world. Isolation is something rural America and the queers who call it home have in common, and this obscure feeling is a thread that still runs through his work today. Having also grown up with the internet consistantly at his fingertips, an obsession with art, fashion, film, and photography quickly arose in his early teens and never left, leading him to study photography in San Francisco, California, and to eventually move to New York City where he operates today. Zander Whalen’s work is for those who love glamour, but prefer its delivery mysterious, beguiling, and slightly abstracted.