Everyone loves a Polaroid picture, the immediacy and materiality of it seeming to convey more feeling—and more of a sense of the real—than anything captured with our camera phones can. That, at least, is the kind of thing that people like to say. But looking through the pages of Bad Bunny by Stillz, which gathers 84 portraits of the Puerto Rican artist taken by his friend and frequent collaborator, those suggestions begin to ring true.
“I’ve always collected images of friends and family—even before I met Benito,” Stillz explains on a recent phone call. “It was not a thing he asked me to do, or anything; it was kind of this secret side project I was doing the whole time.”
The pair first met in Las Vegas, not long after the then 18-year old Colombian-American photographer and director had dropped out of high school and moved from Miami to New York. “We became really good friends right away,” Stillz says. “He asked me to go on tour with him, so I’ve been with him for the last six or seven years.”
Their trust and closeness is evident in the images—laid out in chronological order, from 2019 to 2025—which see Benito dressed up for music videos, after awards shows, or simply hanging out during their down time together. Not only does the collection trace the many eras (and hairstyles) of Bad Bunny, but it also shows an artist growing into himself. “It was important for it to feel archival—this is every photo I have ever taken of him, except for the ones I shot after making the book,” Stillz says. “Benito and I were looking at the book from the beginning yesterday, and it was funny because we saw some outfits and he would be like, ‘I have no idea why I was wearing that.’”
The process also inspired a few more reflective moments: “He stopped at the photos of him as a vampire in ‘Baticano,’ and he was like, ‘This is the best video we’ve done together!’ And I was like, wow! Because we work collaboratively all the time, but afterwards we don’t really celebrate or anything, so it was really nice to be able to look at the images and talk about them together.”
Stillz has directed at least 23 of Bad Bunny’s music videos, plus videos for the likes of Rosalia, Rauw, and Omar Apollo. His debut feature film, Barrio Triste, which he both wrote and directed, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival later this month, before traveling to festivals in Toronto and New York. “My career has been very fast, so another reason why I like making books now is it gives me a physical thing to look at, to pause and remember the stories,” he says.
Stillz’s personal favorite photo is the one he selected for the book’s cover: a shot of Benito in San Juan, about to drink from a coffee cup. “It was one of the first few days we had spent together, and he had his first-ever show at the Choli. I remember those were really important days for his career and it was a beautiful moment, just him with a coffee cup—though I think he was drinking tea—and his eyes are kind of closed. That was a good moment.”