Neue Menschen

For two and a half years Rico Scagliola and Michael Meier took pictures and filmed teenagers, creating an archive of photographs and videos. Neue Menschen (New Human Beings) provides a glimpse into this project.

Teenagers today are the first generation to grow up with the picture-worlds of the Internet. Platforms of self-presentation such as Myspace and Facebook are a normal part of life to them. They learn at a young age how to present themselves in pictures. Meier and Scagliola use the young people’s visual sophistication and skilled self-presentation, integrating the projected pictures and fantasies into their own cosmos of images. The document and its presentation become one and the same. Neue Menschen offers an unusual view into a world in which pictures and life are intertwined ever-more closely—the home of digital natives. Neue Menschen presents views inside this brave new world in which the classical interests of youth and pop culture find a contemporary expression—sex and longing, perfection and reality, beauty and the abyss.
With a Text by Martin Jaeggi in English
Graphic Design: Florian Jakober

Softcover, approx. 500 pages

approx. 500 color images

10 ¼ × 12 ½ in. / 22 x 31 cm

Edition Patrick Frey N° 97