Gallery Le Stockk Marseille
Gen Z
Europe is a continent rich in cultural, historical and geographical diversity. Among its people, youth represent the future of these nations, with dreams, ambitions and realities that vary from country to country. This photographic project aims to capture these young faces, travelling through 10 European countries, divided into two segments : Eastern and Western Europe. This photographic journey aims to create a portrait gallery that reflects the diversity and unity of European youth.
Sociology defines Generation Z, born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, as a generation that stands out for its unique relationship to the time of transience and transition. This generation has an instinctive mastery of digital technologies and social networks, a mastery that profoundly influences their perception and expression of identity. For this generation, time is lived in ephemeral fragments dictated by a constant flow of virtual interactions and representations. The present is perceived as a crossroads of possibilities where every action can change the course of things, thus accentuating the precariousness and fragility of lived moments. This volatile temporality symbolizes an ability to adapt and be resilient in the face of inconstancy, a rapid fading of all action.
Their photographic approach reveals unique trends that reflect their cultural values and perspectives. Photos and selfies are means of expressing identity, capturing aspects of their personalities, emotions and values. These images oscillate between raw, unfiltered snapshots and more posed images, retouched to sublimate their appearance. They are deposited on the wire of a network or drowned in the flow of an unstable digital memory.
The GEN Z photographic project is at the intersection of these approaches, capturing spontaneous moments while embracing an aesthetic that is both raw and pictorial. It proposes a projection outside virtuality, an inventory, a sum of individuality as collective identity, highlighting the composite nature of this generation and accounting for an inclusive representation of genders, diversities and sexual identities.
The choice of a singular photographic device (light mobile studio moved in evenings, bars, living places..) where the models are aware and aware of the intensity of the shooting process including the provision of destabilizing lighting, allows us to capture authentic portraits with a dual objective: to capture the true essence of each individual and reformulate what is considered beautiful, without pretension to be. In a tight space, the photograph operates at portrait level, does not stare, but captures the subject offered to the eye with complacency in a calculated ratio or in the effusion of a skin grain, displaying the defects, and showing thebeyond the subject itself by grasping an essential impulse.
The photographic act thus operates through a distortion of codes and through an unmastered projection of self. It redefines the standards of beauty and highlights a changing time, rich in plurality and fugacity that challenges the objectivity of our view on this generation, mirror in which she contemplates herself by redefining the aesthetic and social criteria of an Europe in perpetual movement.
WORK IN PROGRESS
