Phillip Leeds and YFIF Map a Generation Through Polaroids in ‘Folie à Deux’

Summary

Two independently built Polaroid archives meet for the first time in Monterrey.Phillip Leeds and YFIF document artists, musicians, designers and athletes across generations.The show looks at how repeated encounters can add up to a wider record of culture.

For more than two decades, Phillip Leeds has photographed the people moving through music, fashion and art with a Polaroid Big Shot. Thousands of miles south, Venezuelan artist Your Favorite Internet Friend, better known as YFIF, was building a remarkably similar archive of his own. Their work meets in Folie à Deux, a new exhibition at Colector in Monterrey.

Young Miko, Mac Miller, JAY-Z, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, Virgil Abloh, Naomi Campbell, SZA, Tyler, the Creator, Takashi Murakami and Daddy Yankee all appear in the show. Together, the portraits offer a loose snapshot of the scenes Leeds and YFIF have moved through over the years.

Leeds' archive grew out of New York before stretching west and across the Pacific. YFIF's developed through Venezuela and Latin America, documenting musicians, athletes and artists from inside the culture itself. Neither was following the other's lead, yet both landed on the same camera: the Polaroid Big Shot, a fixed-focus portrait camera introduced in 1971 and famously used by Andy Warhol.

They also share the same rule. The Polaroid is the final object. No negative, no second version, no endless reproduction. One image, one meeting. That feels especially pointed now, when images can be copied, altered or generated almost instantly. Every photograph here required two people to actually be in the same place at the same time.

The title, folie à deux, usually refers to a delusion shared by two people. Here, it describes something closer to a shared obsession arrived at independently: keep photographing long enough and the archive begins to tell the story of an era. The idea comes full circle when Leeds and YFIF photograph each other. One signs the back. The other hides behind his own Big Shot.

Folie à Deux is on view at Colector in Monterrey, Mexico, in August 2026.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by L4UD (@_l_a_u_d_)

Click here to view full gallery at Hypebeast