Stefania Cerea lives and works in Milan, as a researcher.
She approaches photography in 2013, during a depressive crisis. In that period she begins to take self-portraits with her smartphone. In those self-portraits she makes an effort to smile and realizes that looking at them, even though she knows they are false, she feels more real and more related to the world than she was before. After the end of her depressive crisis, her practice of self-portrait ends.
In 2018 she resumes photographing herself and then starts filming herself, with a smartphone and later with a mirrorless. She does it mostly during her orgasm. Raised in a family hostile to any pleasure, her looking at herself enjoying is a way to overcome the sense of guilt. She publishes photos of her face during orgasm on Facebook, to affirm its beauty, depth and power.
From that moment she begins to create and publish other self-portraits, which revolve around dichotomous themes: internalized conditioning and conquest of freedom, apathy and desire, attachment and emotional autonomy, fragility and power, inertia and change. All her photographs have a personal and autobiographical matrix.
In 2019, tired of all the rules imposed by Facebook and tired of the cersorships suffered several times, she decides to stop the publication of her images, but to continue to photograph. In particular, she begins a path that leads her to investigate the relationship between her identity and the surrounding environment.
