Faced with the angst of their own adolescent existence and caught up in the matrix of social media and self-image, teens’ quest for self-discovery and their identities is under increasing pressure, forcing them prematurely into adult drag. Nowadays, it seems that anybody and everybody is expected to be their own personal brand in order to be seen as an accepted participant in society with our worth relying on our online clout.

In these ethereal images of Taja Lilli (age 14 when pictured) representing the “Sweet Sixteen” – blossoming beauty and childlike innocence glitching in the web of possible personas and virtual pageantry, the photographer Luke Nugent “let the computer decide what to do” allowing photoshop to fill in the gaps. The result resembles a kind of inhuman symmetry – the algorithm, looking for a coded perfection leads to distortion of the image.

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