Image and subject

This series examines masculinity within the tension between societal expectation and lived experience, questioning to what extent dominant narratives of masculinity still hold validity today or whether they are already in a process of dissolution. Rather than beginning with answers, the work starts with a shift in perspective: to what extent do young men still experience pressure to embody strength, dominance, and emotional invulnerability, and how far have these expectations already fragmented, become situational, or internally contradictory? Contemporary masculinities emerge within the tension between digital role models and shifting cultural counter-images. In this field, young men do not appear as a homogeneous group, but as a multifaceted spectrum of individual positions moving between adaptation, rupture, and renegotiation of identity. The portraits were created predominantly in the subjects’ private living spaces, which function simultaneously as refuge, stage, and site of identity negotiation. Developed from a female perspective, the work shifts the conditions of visibility. Moments often marginalised in conventional representations of masculinity – such as uncertainty, intimacy, and restrained gestures – are brought to the foreground, while performative codes of strength and control recede. The images do not close identity, but keep it open as a process in formation. Rather than proposing a singular definition, the work assembles perspectives that resist reduction. In doing so, it shifts the question from what a man is to whether this question itself remains productive – and what forms of subjectivity emerge when the photographic gaze becomes an intervening force.