A shot at self-discovery

Emotions and feelings, as embodied cognition teaches us, are a bridge between body and mind, and from one body to another. Portrait photography can convey their intensity and transformation: when directed towards teenagers, it becomes a tool for connection and listening. 

«It was during the pandemic: everything seemed still. Yet teenagers kept growing and experiencing intense, conflicting emotions, despite the world coming to a halt». Francesca Tilio, a photographer from Jesi, driven by the desire to narrate a generation often overlooked and invisible—teenagers—decided in 2020 to launch the project Teenagers of the 21st Century,  a collection of hundreds of adolescent portraits that gives voice to their emotions and perceptions.

Born in Jesi (1975), Francesca Tilio is an artist and photographer focused on the human experience. She has exhibited in London with Les Bonnes and won the Camera d’Oro award in Turin with ME². Her Pink Project, supported by major media outlets and the Italian League for the Fight Against Cancer (LILT), is an itinerant exhibition raising awareness about breast cancer. A finalist in prestigious photography competitions, she has earned recognition for LINK and The QuaranTEEN Project. Since 2023, she has been coordinating Acca Fotografia. Her project Teenagers of the 21st Century has evolved into exhibitions, publications, and educational experiences both in Italy and abroad.

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But what exactly is an emotion? According to the embodied cognition theory, our way of feeling and understanding the world is inseparable from the bodily dimension: emotions do not exist without the physiological reactions accompanying them. They are not fixed entities but processes in constant evolution, changing over time and shaped by context and lived experiences. If fear, joy, anxiety, or desire manifest through a racing heart, tensed muscles, or a warm flush to the face, is it possible to capture these states in a photograph? Can something inherently in flux be frozen in a shot?

Feelings that ignite us

In contemporary debates on cognition¹, the theory of embodied cognition has demonstrated that body and mind form a single, interconnected system. Emotions themselves do not exist without a physical dimension: the body and surrounding environment influence their intensity and quality.Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio makes a clear distinction between emotions and feelings.The former are “outward facing”²: spontaneous biological reactions triggered by external stimuli, such as an accelerated heartbeat when faced with a threat or tensed muscles in response to an affront. Feelings, on the other hand, are “inward facing” and arise when the brain interprets these bodily responses, transforming them into conscious experiences.

Indeed, the brain “constructs” emotions based on signals from the body, which are continuously updated³ and mediated both by “virtual circuits”⁴—the neural mechanisms of bodily representation—and by «the bloodstream, which allows hormones and other peptides to sustain underlying moods»⁵.

In 2013, Bodily Maps of Emotions⁶, a study involving hundreds of volunteers from diverse populations, demonstrated the existence of characteristic patterns of physiological activation, which could be clustered into topographic body maps that light up or dim depending on the emotion experienced. When we are happy, for example, our entire body glows with activation. When we are sad, it dims. When we are angry, there is strong activation in the arms and head. And when we feel anxious, the chest and stomach are primarily engaged. Emotions, therefore, help us perceive ourselves as living beings in constant interaction with our ever-changing surroundings. They evolve alongside our environment and ourselves. Listening to them guides us in understanding our feelings and, to paraphrase Damasio, «they will only find their full realisation with the emergence of a sense of self»⁷.

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Capturing adolescence

This perspective finds a striking echo in Teenagers of the 21st Century, where Tilio has turned her lens towards adolescents to capture their most genuine expressions and emotions. «I was an unhappy teenager, which is why I want to listen to them and meet them in the intimacy of the shot, in the power of the portrait», she explains.

«Observing an expression of emotion», she continues, «also means internally simulating it»⁸, as neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese asserts. We can understand another person’s emotions because we experience them ourselves through the same neural circuits that underpin our own emotional experiences. This is precisely what Francesca Tilio does every time she connects with the subject of her photographs.

The portrait becomes the outcome of an interaction between the photographer and «that indistinct, unformed, and shifting essence that is so typical of being sixteen».

A moment of exchange in which the body—through posture, gesture, and expression—tells a story that words often struggle to express. «I am interested in what they wear and how they wear it, how they move, their gestures, their gazes, their fear or boldness in posing in front of the camera», she explains. «Every time, I try to find a point of connection that allows me to reach the portrait. Each time, I meet people I do not know, and I have to, in a way, court them, so they trust me with their words, their poses, and the cues I give them to interpret themselves». Tilio was inspired by the great work of August Sander⁹, the German photographer who, in the twentieth century, created an extensive collection of portraits cataloguing the people of his time, capturing bankers and boxers, soldiers and circus performers, farmers and families, pilgrims and even corpses. «I loved People of the 20th Century, which is a true visual encyclopedia of humanity, and I decided I would try to do the same for adolescence»: a category that resists further subdivision because it is already, in itself, an archetype—a fleeting and ephemeral stage of life in which everything changes from one day to the next.

This is what fascinates Tilio: «through photography, I want to almost grasp them in this rapidly vanishing moment».

After the first photographs taken in Jesi—where Teenagers of the 21st Century was born to document adolescence during the pandemic—the project expanded beyond national borders. Tilio travelled to France¹⁰, in Caen, and to Germany, in Waiblingen, documenting teenage life in different cultural contexts. The journey also took her through Bologna and Palermo, with each stop culminating in a public exhibition.  «Mine is a social research project, but at the same time, it offers them visibility, a way to be heard in a deep and meaningful way», she explains.

Portraying change

«Every time I work with someone to take their portrait, it is never solely the product of my imagination: I start with an idea, but it deconstructs and shifts along with the person in front of me. I am not working with a landscape but with a human being, and therefore with emotions and feelings, with words, with silence, and with the unspoken», Tilio explains.

The goal is not to capture someone as they are in a definitive way—«an impossible task, as each of us is a constantly shifting blend of nuances», she reiterates—but to convey a meaningful fragment of what teenagers are.Each image in the project is the result of a deliberate choice, guided more by the photographer’s emotional response than by an attempt to adhere strictly to reality. «Every time I go back home, I have twenty digital shots of each subject, and I select the one that speaks to me the most», she explains. Photography thus becomes a storytelling tool, particularly for teenagers, as it offers them not an objective representation of themselves, but a space for reflection and interpretation—a means to explore their identity through another’s gaze.

There are those who are more timid in front of the camera and those who are bolder, eager to be photographed—whether due to cultural or personal differences—but almost all, when the project is presented to the community through a final exhibition, feel seen. As Tilio states, «You realise how powerful this project is when a teenager sees themselves on a poster on a wall. That moment is an affirmation of their significance». Beyond taking portraits, for Teenagers of the 21st Century, in both Italy and Germany, Tilio asked young people to write anonymous reflections about their feelings, their hopes for the future, their fears, and desires, as if they were composing a diary entry. «There are common themes among all the teenagers I have met: anxiety about school, performance pressure, uncertainty about the future. Some say they are very close to their families, while others write that their parents know nothing about them. They are highly changeable, often expressing contradictory thoughts on the same page or even within the same sentence. But I feel glad», Tilio emphasises, «when I see adults reading their words and being surprised by the depth of their feelings». Teenagers are often portrayed as apathetic, glued to their phones, disengaged from the world around them, but the reality is far more complex, and this project has the power to shift that perspective.

The photograph that, for Tilio, represents adolescence as an archetype is almost “sacred” in its pyramidal composition: a group of teenagers looking upwards, their gaze directed towards an uncertain future, while a girl stares directly at the camera, establishing a connection with the viewer. «I took this photo while I was in France, and I feel it contains many symbolic elements. It is an image that evokes dreams, full of meaning, yet at the same time very concrete». The diverse backgrounds of the teenagers add another layer of interpretation to the scene, making it as universal as adolescence itself. A living process in which emotions erupt and feelings are formed with difficulty, shaped by numerous environmental stimuli that are hard to process clearly. The apparent stillness and the continuous transformation reflect the very process of growing up. The photograph attempts to capture this, eluding immutable objectivity. It is no coincidence that Teenagers of the 21st Century began with its first shots in front of a Ligustrum Japonicum tree outside Tilio’s home—an ever-changing tree that, like the emotions of adolescents in 2020, transformed from one photo to the next. It could not be fixed, only offered as a narrative to be recognised and to recognise oneself in.

 

The story mentioned in this article was discovered using an artificial intelligence tool, Asimov, developed by ASC 27 especially for Mangrovia. The tool helped us discover the story, but the rest of the content you read and see is the result of creative processes and human sensibilities, and is in no way generated by artificial intelligence. That is why we use artificial intelligence in the editorial office!

1. Our ability to know, learn and evaluate the surrounding reality. ↩︎
2. Damasio, A., R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. Body and emotion in the Making of Consciousness; trad. it. Emozione e coscienza, Adelphi, Milano 2000, pp. 52-53. ↩︎
3. Ibidem. ↩︎
4. They are termed “virtual” because they do not exist as fixed physical structures, but are formed dynamically according to the needs of the moment. ↩︎
5. Colombetti, G., & Thompson, E. (2008). Il corpo e il vissuto affettivo: verso un approccio «enattivo» allo studio delle emozioni. Rivista Di Estetica, 37, 77–96, p. 38. https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.1982. ↩︎
6. Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2013). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(2), 646–651. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1321664111 ↩︎
7. Damasio, A., R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. Body and emotion in the Making of Consciousness; trad. it. Emozione e coscienza, Adelphi, Milano 2000, pp. 52-53. ↩︎
8. Guerra, M. (2020). The empathic screen: Cinema and Neuroscience. ↩︎
9. Sander, A. (1986). August Sander : Citizens of the Twentieth Century: Portrait Photographs 1892-1952. ↩︎
10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwFi0Xled1g&t=11s ↩︎