From digital artists to photographers, body sculptors and hair stylists to make-up and nail artists, in our Highlight series, we profile the creatives tearing up the rulebook of their respective industries.

Daniel Sannwald’s photographs exist in a world barely more fantastical than this one, where the road between reality and fantasy, between art and fashion is blurred. Inspired by sci-fi and the magical, Sannwald’s work explores hyperreal and hallucinatory places producing truly original and attention-grabbing images filled with vibrant color and weird textures and glitches. “I wish to mix and play with forms, colors and shapes in a way that they convey with me,” Sannwald says. “I like to seek out beauty in errors and failures too. I wish to create beauty with contradictions.”

Currently based in London, the German photographer grew up in Munich and studied on the Royal Academy of High-quality Arts in Belgium before living for a short while in Bangkok and Yogyakarta where he was an artist in residency with the political group MES 56. “All these places, the melange of cultures have shaped me and my work,” he says. It was Sannwald’s time on the Royal Academy, a faculty well-known for its prestigious fashion department, nonetheless, that opened his eyes to the creative possibilities of fashion and by his graduation he had already been commissioned by each Dazed and i-D.

Since then, Sannwald has shot everyone from Travis Scott and M.I.A to Pharrell Williams. Fresh off photographing Kylie Jenner for Dazed Beauty’s inaugural issue cover, we spoke to Sannwald about his creative process, shooting Rihanna is a bath filled with slime, and the way an old TV inspired his love of glitches.

Growing up, what informed your understanding of beauty and identity?
Daniel Sannwald: I grew up in a family who played live role-playing games and were very much into sci-fi and fantasy stories and flicks. I loved anime and foreign movies growing up. We had amazing independent cinemas in Munich.

Have you usually been desirous about imagery?
Daniel Sannwald: My father died after I was seven years old and I grew up being very near my mother. After I was around 12 or 13 I discovered a box left behind by my late father. It was stuffed with artworks, a number of airbrush paintings but mainly video and photography work. As I hardly had memories of my father, this box and its contents was a strategy to learn more about his mind. That day I understood the impact and power of images and a number of years later I realised that I desired to create images too.

What made you wish to turn into a photographer? How did you really get into it?
Daniel Sannwald: I studied visual arts on the Royal Academy of High-quality Arts in Antwerp, Belgium with a significant in Photography and Video. After my classes within the academy, I began to construct loads of friendships and collaborated with the style students and slowly understood my interests. Within the second yr of my studies, I shared my portfolio with i-D and Dazed and got commissioned by each of them.

Tell us a bit about your creative process. From initial idea to final image.
Daniel Sannwald: I even have a workspace in my flat for research and inventive idea development, where I work with up to 3 assistants. It’s an area where most of my pitches and concepts come together and take form. I get inspired by various things in life, it really relies on the project. Normally I spend more time in research, development and post than on set shooting. Depending on the project, different teams are called in to assist me in post-production with CGI, the burning and bleaching of images, chemical emulsions, or hyper-real retouching.

Is beauty something you are trying to capture in your work or something that you simply reject? What’s your relationship to “beauty”?
Daniel Sannwald: In fact, I like beauty. I’m an artist, I really like to mix and play with forms, colors and shapes in a way that they convey with me. I like to seek out beauty in errors and failures too. I wish to create beauty with contradictions equivalent to hi-fi and lo-fi.

What do you’re thinking that your work says about beauty?
Daniel Sannwald: My beauty work, specifically, is kind of hyper real. I believe the work of my late father had an impact on that. He used to do airbrush paintings of my mother or self-portraits where he’s sleeping with these super sleek airbrushed other women. It almost looked like people from one other planet yet so familiar. I felt my father’s desire for these airbrushed ladies and I believe my beauty work is inspired by that.

How would you describe your aesthetic?
Daniel Sannwald: In my work, I explore hyperrealism, hallucinatory and fantastical places. I’m inspired by sci-fi and by the magical. I wish to explore recent ways to capture images using every thing from flip phones to broken scanners to big cameras. I like mixing and mixing textures. A friend of mine once said that in a really sensitive way I create fantasy postcards from in every single place. Greetings from the uncertain cosmos, from ancient Egypt, amethyst caverns or Krypton, amongst others.

There appears to be an emphasis on color and weird texture in your work, where does this interest come from?
Daniel Sannwald: I grew up appreciating recent textures. After I was an adolescent my family gave me an old TV to avoid me occupying the lounge. The TV had a glitch every so often which interrupted and distorted my cartoons and anime.  I had this bad printer after I went to the art academy and all my online research images had printed out in black and white with extreme pixelation… I believe all these small things had a huge impact on my work.

You’ve worked with loads of notable people – Kelela, Travis Scott etc. What do you’re thinking that your images say about each sitter?
Daniel Sannwald: When you work with a musician on an album artwork like M.I.A., Yves Tumour, Kelela it’s really the merging of two creatives — the artist’s world after which my artistic interpretation of that world.  It is a special feeling in the event you could be a part of a musician’s visual journey. I feel I even have more stories to inform concerning the shoots I’ve done with musicians than in my work with fashion. After I shot Rihanna a number of years ago we rented the presidential suite within the hotel where she was staying and covered the toilet and lounge with litres of slime to wash in. It led to a unbelievable slime party. All of the music collaborations are like a diary stuffed with invisible stories and memories to me.

Are you able to tell us a bit about your shoot with Kylie for Dazed Beauty?
Daniel Sannwald: It was quite funny because I shot her boyfriend Travis two days prior. When Kylie arrived she mentioned that he’d showed her the pictures in bed on his phone and that he was very completely satisfied. It was so sweet. Kylie arrived early and was super skilled and fun to work with. The shoot itself was relatively quick and easy as many of the magic happened afterwards. Over the vacations my partner and I worked in Mexico with Lukas from BeautyGan in Berlin, creating collages of makeup images generated from algorithms to mix with the pictures I shot of Kylie.

How do you’re thinking that the industry has evolved because you first started off?
Daniel Sannwald: After I began social media wasn’t that big. I only used MySpace. With the expansion of social media, every thing became faster and faster. Deadlines and turnarounds are much quicker now. More content is required, increasingly more images must be produced. Clients don’t have extra money so that they must divide their budgets tighter to suit all of the content they need. But together with those challenges comes something I find beautiful. Everyone seems to be more connected and intertwined.

What advice would you give to young artists hoping to get into the industry?
Daniel Sannwald: Be passionate, work hard and construct a network of other creatives who inspired you and also you encourage.

What are you currently working on?
Daniel Sannwald: I just shot a perfume campaign with Isamaya Ffrench and I’m busy preparing a shoot in Shanghai. I wish to balance my photography and video work with community work.