My Social Generation

My Social Generation: Please, don't try this at home! is a photographic and digital art series by Italian multidisciplinary artist Anna Utopia Giordano exploring self-image, beauty and the emerging visual language of social networks. Created in 2010/11, at a moment when social media was beginning to transform the way young people presented themselves online, the project examines the relationship between identity, photography and digital self-representation. Giordano adopts the role of a fictional contemporary teenager, recreating the poses, gestures and visual conventions associated with the self-portraits and profile photographs shared by young users on social networks. Through photography and digital postproduction, these deliberately constructed images reproduce and exaggerate a visual language that was rapidly becoming familiar in everyday online culture.

The project uses this apparently informal photographic language as a critical device to question the construction of identity online, the pressure to conform to emerging ideals of beauty and the ways in which the self is edited and performed through images. My Social Generation was presented through both exhibitions and a site-specific installation.