Ambroise Degenne’s first photo book is a raw coming-of-age diary in Paris

At a party, Ambroise Degenne and his best friend overheard the phrase “chunky milk”. They assumed it meant spoiled milk and spent the entire evening joking about it. When he came to name his first photo book, the words came back to him, only they meant something far more personal. “The title feels even more meaningful now because my best friend has been going through some tough times and, sadly, we don’t see each other as much as we used to; so, the title serves as a little nod to her,” he says. “A sense of time passing is also important to me in my photographs, so the idea of ‘spoiled milk’ felt fitting for this collection of images.”

Published by Burbia Studio in an edition of 150, Chunky Milk has the loose, instinctive rhythm of someone who carries a camera everywhere and stops whenever a person or composition snags their attention. Made largely in Paris and on his travels between 2025 and early 2026, you’ll see moments between strangers, graffiti sprayed on building facades, days spent lounging in bedrooms, smoking cigs out the window and clinking beers with friends – all caught in an unflashy, documentary-learning style. “I don’t really plan out my days, so I never quite know who I’ll see or where I’ll go,” Degenne says. “I like being able to photograph those unexpected moments.”

Born in Paris in 2007, Degenne grew up facing a railway line, spending afternoons at the living-room window watching painted trains pass and copying their graffiti into sketchbooks. He wondered about “the people who defied the rules to express their art” – and, by age eight, he’d joined them. At home, he was inspired by his father’s jungle and drum & bass records featuring artist names and label logos in lettering resembling graffiti tags. “Naturally, I soon started getting involved myself,” he says, “visiting graffiti shops to find magazines and books dedicated to the culture.” What he found were publications including Subway Art, Descente Interdite, French Kiss, Wild War and Thunder Control. 

Photography began as a way of archiving his own paintings, until people from the scene introduced him to Dash Snow, Ari Marcopoulos and Ryan McGinley, chroniclers of raw, unvarnished youth subculture. These days, he’s drawn to photographers who turn an observational, anti-spectacular gaze on the everyday: Guido Guidi, whose work lingers on the unglamorous margins of the Italian landscape; Luigi Ghirri, whose pictures make deadpan poems of signs and walls; and Lewis Baltz, whose imagery finds cool, orderly grids in suburbs and industrial parks. Ambroise brings a similar unshowy attention to the landscapes of Paris. “Sometimes it’s a sign, a bench or even a section of a wall that catches my eye, without me fully understanding why I feel such an urge to photograph it,” he says. “Photography has become an obsession, replacing the one I previously had for graffiti.”

And while the graffiti still features heavily throughout the book, giving it context and grit, it’s the people who add a sense of warmth through the pages. In one frame, taken in New York in April 2025, his friend Tenzin lies half-awake in bed, towers filling the window behind him and a laptop abandoned on the floor. It was Ambroise’s first trip to the city alone, and he spent ten days sleeping fully dressed on a deflated mattress in Tenzin’s living room, beside a window that wouldn’t close properly. “I was exhausted and sick; all I could think about was getting back to my own bed in Paris,” he recalls. “To me, this photo sums up the end of that trip.”

Elsewhere, Nelson sits in a green jumper, head tilted, in his girlfriend’s Paris apartment. Degenne met him at 13, and he has become a kind of older brother; he was there when Degenne painted his first subway train. “I grew up alongside him,” he says. “He taught me so much, always treating me with respect and never looking down on me.” Then there’s a flash-lit wedding in Tokyo last October, where one half of the couple holds up a peace sign in a white glove and the other wears a long veil like a scarf. Ambroise hardly knew the newlyweds, Sorat and Barry McGee, when he landed for his first trip to Japan, but after a few days of surfing in the south, they became friends. “It is largely thanks to them that I began exploring painting and drawing beyond graffiti.”

These are not just subjects but the people through whom Degenne has lived this stretch of his life. “Beyond friendship, they intrigue and inspire me! I suppose I’m a bit of a fan of theirs,” he says. “Some are people I worry about, others I don’t yet know very well, and some are people I see every day. Together, they feel like a second family.”

The first version of Chunky Milk was made for his entrance interviews at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he now studies Fine Art, and shaping it into a book has changed how he sees his pictures. “I used to think my photos could stand on their own – an idea that seems completely absurd to me now,” he says. He already suspects he’ll see this edition differently in a few months. But for someone who calls himself “pretty hopeless with technology”, print offers a kind of safekeeping. Chunky Milk, then, is a book about time, and a small act of defiance against it – and unlike the real thing, the pages won’t go bad if left too long in the fridge. “I’ve always loved seeing my work in print, as something tangible,” he says. “I’ve always appreciated the physicality of things; that’s one of the reasons I use analogue photography as a medium. So, in a way, now that Chunky Milk exists, I feel like these photos will remain alive forever.”

Chunky Milk by Ambroise Degenne is published by Burbia Studio and will be available here. The launch will take place at Reference Point, London, on 29 October 2026.