Like Juergen Teller, whose shoes she filled at ZEITMagazine, Swedish model-turned-photographer Lina Scheynius is not shy when it comes to documenting the luminously raw yet delicate moments of her friends’s personal lives, and her own. Simultaneously voyeur and participant, her poised nudity challenges traditional theories of the female role as passive and objectified. Yet her interplay of casual observations—a calloused heel, fingers interlocking, a moment observed alone on the toilet, or a glimpse of her lover’s penis in the bathtub—still manages to feel exposed, tender, and sincere.
In an age of Instagram-selfies, Scheynius’ diary reads like a Sasha-Grey-meets–Tracy-Emin collection of images underlined by surprisingly strong sexuality but without being at all sensationalist. Despite her commercial success as a regular fashion contributor to Dazed and Vogue, her photographs still manage to find beauty in the simplest, most unanticipated moments. More than mere snapshots of the everyday, her work is full of emotional meditation—part autobiographical, part still-life, but always affirming a refreshingly frank and unapologetic vision of contemporary life.
Lina Scheynius’s first solo exhibition in Europe opens at Christophe Guye Galerie on the 30th of August 2013 in Zurich.
