Stevie, 20, Rome, photographed in his bedroom. Photograph: Niccolò Rastrelli/Institute View image in fullscreen Stevie, 20, Rome, photographed in his bedroom. Photograph: Niccolò Rastrelli/Institute Photography The faces behind the feeds: Gen Z’s private lives and public posts – in pictures For the first digital natives, there are two places to express yourself: in the comfort of your own room and online. Photographer Niccolò Rastrelli set out to find out how the identities compare
Prefer the Guardian on Google S ocial media arrived just as I, a younger millennial, was on the brink of teenhood. My friends and I signed up for accounts on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, as well as less remembered sites such as the now defunct Bebo. We didn’t know what we were doing; no one did. We posted indiscreet messages and photos on public feeds that we wouldn’t want any future employer – or really anyone, for that matter – to see. Then gradually we, and our parents and their parents, too, learned what it means to live with that world-changing phenomenon that we term social media. We started to find different ways to adapt, a process that is ongoing.
But what is the experience like for gen Z, the first generation of “digital natives”, for whom the language of the internet is a mother tongue? That is the question that led the Italian photographer Niccolò Rastrelli to embark on the project IRL (the online acronym, of course, for a phrase denoting our offline existences: in real life).
Rastrelli has long been interested in the way people construct their identities through self-presentation. “In the last few years, I’ve also worked a lot with younger people. I’m older and don’t have children, so I want to understand their point of view,” says the photographer, who was born in 1977, making him a member of generation X. Past works include a project exploring the rising popularity around the globe of the youth subculture of cosplay. Now he felt it was time to broaden his focus to a more ubiquitous experience: being on the “socials”.
“I wanted to portray the diversity in gen Z,” Rastrelli says. He recruited subjects across the full span of the generation, from 14-year-olds to adults in their late 20s. Most were in Italy, but he also visited the UK, Morocco and France. Each portrait has two paired components. On one side the subject is photographed in their bedroom, whether in their family home or in a flatshare or university halls. They are intentionally posed, nearly always making eye-contact with the camera. S ome clutch their phones, or sit by a computer. Often there is the familiar sight of a tangle of cords and plugs in an extension cable by the bed.
When you’re young, your bedroom is such an important place. It’s really your first solo home “I decided to shoot in the bedroom because when you’re young it’s such an important place. It’s really your first solo home,” Rastrelli explains. “Before social media, it was also the main place where you could build your identity.” Your room and the things inside it – posters, paintings, books, an electric guitar, a barbell, a massivestuffed unicorn – tell a story about what kind of person you are and want to be.
Nowadays, the same goes for social media. And so, alongside those portraits, Rastrelli asked each of his subjects to pick snapshots of their phone screens that represented their usual activity. Nearly everything is from Instagram , one of gen Z’s main apps of choice – and many of the images are from t…