This photography exhibition lets Gen Z tell their own story

There is a relentless panic around Gen Z. “Is Gen Z Unemployable?” wonders the Wall Street Journal. “How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z”, the New York Times decries. “Mall-going but budget-constrained: Gen-Z shoppers shape the future of retail”, The Guardian scrutinises. 

The exhibition Gen Z: Shaping A New Gaze at Photo Elysée in Switzerland, thankfully, contains absolutely none of this hand-wringing. The show brings together 66 artists from around the world, structured into four parts that explore the new iconographies and fixations of a young generation: reevaluating social norms, the weight of family legacy, chosen communities, body dysmorphia, gender representation, and more. Many projects address similar sentiments despite being created in different parts of the world.

Co-curator Hannah Pröbsting was quick to clarify: “I certainly do not want to claim that you can come in and understand the generation with this exhibition. That is definitely not the case. But we do feel that the people who don’t expect to be moved are moved. And I think if there’s one thing that I want people to take away, from a photography point of view, it’s that this generation has complete agency over telling their own story.”

The show opens with an image by American artist Sara Messinger, in which a trio of girls are crowding a mirror to apply eye makeup while Messinger snaps them and herself with an analogue camera. The visitor then walks through a barrage of images by Noyan, who used a point-and-shoot to chronicle his life as a teenager in Zurich. “It’s not a sociological exhibition,” co-curator Julie Dayer noted. “You’ve got Gen Z looking at themselves. They’re taking pictures of their histories and their communities.” She rephrased it this way: “We really wanted to make an exhibition with Gen Z, and not about Gen Z.” The exhibition’s purpose is an examination of their creative talent and output.

To make their selection, Dayer and Pröbsting consulted other curators, book publishers, teachers, gallerists, directors, and older artists, and of course scoured Instagram. They focused on works created by photographers born between 1995 and 2010, but “it’s not that you’re born on the first of January of 1995 and suddenly you change your photography practice,” Dayer reasoned. (The oldest photographer here was born in 1992). Despite the diversity of the photographers, Pröbsting revealed an easily identifiable common thread: “One thing that we noticed whenever we were reading the artist biographies, compared to maybe ten years ago, is the importance of intersectionality – and not just as a base for discrimination, but as a base for joy and for celebration.”

Who ‘gets’ to speak about a subject can be a sensitive subject, but there’s an unequivocal legitimacy in speaking about one’s own experience, rather than documenting other communities as a stranger. “They’re speaking about themselves and they’re showing themselves to the world in the way they want to,” Dayer affirmed. As for criticism of selfishness for only looking at oneself? “No, actually… they speak about themselves because they have the right to do so,” Dayer countered. She contextualised that one possible factor was that many of these photographers were teenagers during the pandemic and often confined to their rooms, which may partly explain why their own bodies or faces became readily available means of telling a story.”

Almost all of the works in the exhibition are unframed (they’re either mounted on wood or aluminium, or presented as wallpaper), and all the exhibition texts explaining the projects in the show are direct quotes from the creators themselves, rather than curatorial analyses. Many of the photographers have shot campaigns, while others followed the art school path and focus on fine art photography. For some, this exhibition shows a side of them that is less publicly known. Haitian American Daveed Baptiste is someone whose work as a fashion designer has overshadowed his photographic output, which nonetheless remains his other meaningful creative practice. Salomé Gomis-Trezise creates video clips for Travis Scott and advertising for Nike, while her personal project is experimental AI work to correct the fact that, growing up, she did not see images of Black people the way she wanted to see them represented.

The image chosen for the exhibition poster is from Beautiful Resistance by Nigerian photographer Daniel Obasi, who created his project in the wake of police violence used against protesters in the streets of Lagos. Although the aestheticism of his images is only obliquely political, he flaunts an emblematic and provocative version of the Nigerian flag with a red sun, once considered a bad omen. German duo Florian Gatzweiler and Sascha Levin met at school in Berlin, and then met Ukrainian-born Anton in the Polish town Słubice at the border near Germany. Their photo reportage project addresses the Ukrainian youth, in limbo after the full-scale invasion. After Anton returned to fight in Ukraine, the German duo took screenshots of their FaceTime exchanges and his Instagram stories. “It’s preserving an archive that talks a lot about war and the relationship that the new generation has with images of war,” Dayer remarked of their project.

Chinese photographer Ziyu Wang uses image-making to wrestle with the feeling that he’s at the bottom of the hierarchy of masculinity, thereby rendered completely invisible. Colombian photographer Isabella Madrid, whose image covers the exhibition catalogue, addresses the conflicting and contradictory expectations that are placed on women in South America (and beyond), to be somehow maternal but also extremely sexy. Both Wang and Madrid use prosthetics: exaggerated breasts and shoulder pads, depicting the violence of the way we expect bodies to perform a gendered ideal. 

Pröbsting concluded: “We’re not saying [these concerns are] not important to millennials, to boomers, Generation X. Far from it, because I feel like almost all of the projects have some point of connection to almost everyone.” Dayer added: “It’s fun how you can scale it differently, comparing it to your story.” 

Gen Z – Shaping A New Gaze is running until February 1 2026 at Photo Elysée in Switzerland.