These days, embracing exhibitionism is something we do en masse. Our Instagram feeds are our own personal galleries: we make space for beautifying filters, but make sure to leave the bits of reality we don’t like outside of the frame. Cutting and shaping our own personas online is satisfying, no doubt—but it also erases any vulnerability or intimacy we have that’s unfit for the social sphere. This contemporary conundrum is the core of Eva Zar‘s latest project, Shy but not Shy: a series of photos of youth in New York capturing the performances many of us undertake to make ourselves Instagram-worthy. In doing so, she captures our collective spaces of curated femininity, gender and identity in a way that’s relatable as it is captivating. As Zar told Paper Mag, “my intention was to find that really intense and really fragile moment of a person before the staging. I really tried to not [overstylize] anything and to make it as natural as possible.”
Peeps the work below—and if you like what you see, go check out her upcoming show at Kvit Gallery in Copenhagen called Please Let Me Die Already. It open October 14th at kl. 17.
