On Guard: How Teenagers Learn to Be Men
Latvian photographer and writer. She received a BA in Photography from the University of Brighton, UK, and an MA in Visual Communication at the Art Academy of Latvia. In 2012, she received a grant for exchange studies at the Nagoya University of Arts, Japan. Member of ISSP, a non-commercial education and networking platform for photographers in Latvia and internationally. Curator of the photobook festival Self Publish Riga. Her work has been showed in Latvia, Japan, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Austria and the Netherlands.
— I am interested in notions of masculinity, and how our understanding of it is tied to the military and violence. Military education can serve as a contemporary initiation ritual for adulthood, and at the same time, can satisfy a romantic boyhood dream of going back to nature. By choosing adolescents who are in the process of learning how to be men as the subjects of my work, I want to emphasize vulnerability, insecurities, inconsistencies, and moments of rest or suspension, and in doing so, stress the performative and unstable nature of masculinity itself.
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