My Love For You Was Never Real

EDITION

2022, Shortlisted

school

FH Bielefeld,
Germany

In my photographic series “My Love For You Was Never Real,” I deal with my generation (Gen Z), whose everyday life has long been determined by the constantly renewing feeds, and ask myself how the feeling of living in our generation can be described. With a photographic language that quotes advertising and popular images, the series references emotional states difficult to put into words, somewhere between longing, despair, and hope, which lure behind the standardised image surfaces in the feed. Competition, pressure to perform, the pursuit of perfection and obsession with beauty and one’s appearance, the craving of spectacle and intense emotions, disorientation, total immersion in other worlds, and the longing for interpersonal connections line up like verses in a poem that cannot be interpreted absolutely or definitively.

Bodies interact with themselves and the viewers, their surroundings, other bodies, and objects, and pose questions about influences and relationships, equilibria, and acceleration. These subjective references point to a present-day image of our generation. Disjointed, narrative scenes create a conglomerate without a clear beginning or ending and encircle the feeling of our zeitgeist.