Text by Nicholas Behrens
All Images © Chiara Fossati
Chiara Fossati (born in Legnano, 1984) trained as a photographer at Studio Fondazione Marangoni in Florence and at Goldsmith College in London, where she earned a Master’s degree in Photography and Urban Cultures. In 2010 she joined Cesura as an intern and became an official member a few years later. In 2014, she took part, as a photographer and truck driver, in The Danube Revisited: The Inge Morath Truck Project. From 2018 to 2023 she taught Contemporary Photography History at IED Milan. While at Cesura she has produced Whatever and Villaggio dei Fiori—the latter won the 2018 Pesaresi Prize—as well as Comete, her third long-term project, which received the WeWorld mention at the Ponchielli Prize in 2022.
Adolescence is a strange time. You discover new things, start exploring the world, friendships are lost and others deepened, while day by day you begin to understand who you are becoming. Your body changes, as does your gaze—how you perceive others and how they perceive you. You are no longer a child, not yet an adult, and anything can happen. What does it mean to be a teenager today? How does the place we grow up in shape our understanding of the world around us? And what about the internet? What gives form to the dreams of new generations, and how do those dreams hold up to their real-life expectations? With Comete, Chiara Fossati charts a path to better understand new generations during this delicate stage of life.
Like many great portraitists, Fossati is a humanist photographer. Her photography is a way of approaching people, getting to know them, learning their stories and telling them through revealing glances. Her first project, Whatever, captures the rave community that was her family during her early youth. The second, Villaggio dei Fiori, focuses on the Milan neighbourhood that adopted her and the people who make it feel like home. In her third project, Comete, the subject expands to a community of young girls representing the generation after hers, in an effort to investigate the shifts time has brought between them. As with the other series, this one stemmed from a deep interest: “At some point, I realized that over the years I had photographed a lot of teenagers, especially girls. I’d been doing it for years, often within other projects, and I kept returning to it.” The isolation of the pandemic, imagining what it meant for sixteen-year-olds who were just beginning to discover the world, was the trigger that gave the project its shape.
The title comes from the photographer’s fascination with space: “[…] I see adolescence as that moment in life when anything is still possible, you can go anywhere or crash completely, and it felt natural to imagine these girls as comets, captured in that fleeting instant where every possibility is still open before disappearing who knows where.” The ongoing series gathers portraits of young girls taken over the past ten years across Italy, serving as an investigation into new generations. The subjects are girls aged 12 to 22/23—though recently boys have joined as well—met on the street, in shopping malls or schools. The process involves stopping, interviewing and photographing them, all as calmly as possible. The word conversation would in fact be preferable to interview, because the goal isn’t just to ask questions and get answers, but to form a connection that encourages the subject to lower their guard and share their story, fully and openly. After this initial introduction, they look for a quiet place and begin the portrait session. The rule is to take three photos per person, without rushing. The girls’ eyes are vivid, piercing. They stare straight into the lens, as if it were a doorway hiding what life has in store for them.
The habit to interview her subjects is embedded in Fossati’s practice, which began doing it with Whatever. For Comete, the interviews began around 2020, when the project took on structure. The questions touch on where the girls come from, what they miss, what they love, where they’d like to live or travel, what they want to do when they grow up and their dreams—as well as more intimate questions, like the last time they cried and why. These questions open a window that gives three-dimensionality to the portraits, making the project a living thing capable of telling us more about an age we often struggle to understand. The picture that emerges is different from what one might expect: “[…] compared to when I was their age, there’s much less desire to escape, maybe because of the internet and the feeling that everything is just a click away. I see in many of these kids a kind of fragility that makes them fearful of far-off or unfamiliar places.” Many want to see the world and travel, but almost all want to return home—whether that’s a small village in the Aosta Valley or the city of Rimini. Another recurring theme is the need young people feel to constantly control their image. The media exposure that comes with social media leads to a systematic construction of self-presentation, which can shape deeply ingrained self-perceptions. “In Aosta I met an incredibly beautiful girl who absolutely didn’t want to be photographed because she said she looked bad in pictures. We made a deal: I’d send the photo to her and her best friend, who would be the judge. When I developed it, it was stunning—and they both loved it.”
Comete is still ongoing, currently accompanied by a project on albinism and the idea of a manual on Italy’s province, but a book publication could mark a turning point in its development. So far, exhibitions of the project have focused on the portraits, but for the book the idea is to give voice to the girls through the pen of a writer who would turn the interviews into narrative, pairing text with photography. In the meantime, the series continues to grow, enriched every day by new faces and untold stories that might help bridge that mental distance that too often prevents us from remembering what it means to be a teenager.
