Twenty years after “reGeneration,” an exhibition that brought together the best work from students and alumni of international photography schools, Photo Elysée once again places emerging talent at the heart of its program. “Gen Z. A New Gaze” is “a mass,” as Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the institution, explains. “A mass, because what we wanted was to highlight a collective voice.”
Sixty-six photographers come together to reveal the themes that animate an entire generation. “Born between 1990 and 2010, these artists have lived with the internet since childhood. They’ve witnessed the acceleration of social movements forming communities online. They no longer need to travel to have an opinion about what’s happening in the world, and they know they can share their images everywhere,” Herschdorfer summarizes. All these changes, within just a few years, have forged an entirely new way of thinking about the photographic series — or even about the creative act itself.
At the heart of the exhibition, humanity takes center stage: from room to room, landscapes are scarce, replaced instead by variations on what it means to be human — a triumphant, proud being or a vulnerable, mistreated body. Sometimes solitary, seeking peace through disconnection, sometimes determined to proclaim its identity. Everywhere, the body reveals itself — by undressing, by donning costumes, by calming itself or fighting back, reflecting itself, deforming itself, exhibiting itself. It becomes, in fact, plural. From this starting point, curators Hannah Pröbsting and Julie Dayer have devised a journey — from the space one occupies to the deconstruction of dominant ideologies. Along the way, visitors encounter struggles: intimate, political, environmental.
The home: between shelter and struggle
The journey begins with the home — the place that sees us grow up, symbolizing refuge or violence. It is a foundational space of identity that many Gen Z photographers explore. Through the staging of two bodies — her own and her mother’s — Swiss photographer Lorane Hochstätter questions her position regarding the feminine norms she was raised with: concepts inherited from the former model who brought her up.
In her images, gestures oscillate unsettlingly between support and conflict as the two women’s cheeks press together and their hands grasp one another. In a curious dollhouse, American-German photographer Francesca Hummler disrupts all notions of scale by placing her adopted sister at the center of her project. The setting — an old family heirloom — becomes a symbol of legitimacy they claim for themselves, a place they assert as their own, free from feelings of discrimination.
Not far away, Sara de Brito Faustino’s work radically shifts the representation of a reassuring, warm home. “This is a witness to the scars of the past,” says the Portuguese-Dutch artist. Here, a fleshy house is pierced by metal hangers; there, a body’s skin peels away or a plastered limb dries beside the dishes. We glimpse ruins in the scars that struggle to heal — the body that hurts, and the familiarity of rooms we nonetheless know by heart. This ambivalence raises a question: how do we understand “home” when it can no longer promise safety?
It’s a question Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo also takes up. In his work, the South African photographer revisits his childhood spent in a house that housed a bar. “The realities I was confronted with in that place made me want to escape,” he recalls. He evokes that feeling in his ghostly creations, where blurred silhouettes appear and fade, anonymous and shadowy within a monochrome world stained with ethanol.
Freezing the unbearable and the sublime
Beyond the domestic sphere, identity construction unfolds in step with Gen Z’s emancipation. Signing the exhibition’s poster, Daniel Obasi first captures the beauty of protest: Nigerian youth coming together to demonstrate against government oppression. A gathering violently suppressed by the state, the event is immortalized by the photographer for its evocative power. In his images, bodies rise proudly, asserting their dream — that of an ideal Nigeria. They become a true emblem, for it is precisely these bodies that form the exhibition’s guiding thread.
In the work of Laurence Philomène and Mahalia Taje Giotto, bodies appear nude, posing and becoming canvases on which the artists write — inscribing, directly onto their skin, the claims that drive them. In the works of Mayssa Khoury and Matthieu Croizier, bodies bend, fold, contort, or split into multiple parts, emphasizing both movement and metamorphosis. Between concealment and the revelation of a queer identity made of “fragments,” they break free from rigid categories to embrace fluidity.
For Charlie Tallott and D.M. Terblanche, bodies ultimately become our salvation: they feel our euphoria and allow us to create. Through powerful flashes or stark black-and-white contrasts, these artists turn photography into “a refuge” or “a reckoning with pain and its consequences” — a way to freeze the unbearable as much as the sublime. It is an act of radical honesty that reverberates throughout the exhibition halls. An unexpected unity, but one made possible “by the circulation of images, which turns these themes into universal concerns,” the curators conclude.
“Gen Z. Shaping A New Gaze” is on view at Photo Elysée in Lausanne until February 1, 2026.
