“MIU MIU PORTRAITS” TELL THE BEAUTY, THE SECRETS AND THE TORMENT OF FEMALE TEENS
Text by: Annarosa Laureti
The charm, and the complexity as well, of the portraiture art lies on the ability of stopping the time passing and capturing once forever the inner being, the soul, of the person portrayed in a certain moment.
Sharp and precise as a scalpel, graduated as a magnifier, the camera lens first cuts the superficial mask and then meticulously analyzes every single details of every model trying to grasp her hidden secrets.
Empathizing with the subject is essential for the success of the entire shooting. The young Danish UK based photographer Julie Greve knows it well. Graduated at Central Saint Martins, in 2018 she won the “Your Picture/Our Future” photography competition launched by the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson, becoming one of the photographers of the very JW Anderson Fall Winter 2018 Campaign. Shooting also the same brand’s Spring Summer 2019 Campaign, the young talent is now one of the creative minds – together with the stylist Lotta Volkova – behind the latest “Miu Miu Portraits” project by the namesake brand.
Doing a casting completely throughout social media, she picked up some teenage girls from, or nearby, her hometown in Denmark to portray in Miu Miu clothes from Pre Fall and FW 2019 Collections.
That of impressing on film the delicate female growth process is a thematic increasingly in vogue between a new generation of young women photographers who have made the success of their projects thanks on IG and social media, reaching a sensitive feminine public. Half way from a dreamy tale of pastel hues and a reportage of soft lights, the pictures of artists such as Petra Collins, Ashley Armitage and Heather Lighton perfectly narrate the charming yet complicated teenage years, made of constantly ups and downs in between an explosion of tenderness, happiness and carefreeness and a sudden rush of insecurities, doubts and fears.
With “Miu Miu Portaits” Julie Greve, used to capture intimate portrays since University’s years, has gone beyond telling the delicate transition to adulthood, and tried to catch that embarrassing moment of being portrayed, maybe even more thorny during the very adolescence. We can immediately understand from the pictures all the hard work of both the photographer and her subjects of being spontaneous respectively behind and in front of the camera lens. Choosing to shot in an aseptic studio, delating every references or clues about girls’ personality, the pictures show great depth of introspection and a tender yet troubled atmosphere pervades from them.
In line with iconic Miuccia’s maverick attitude, Miu Miu portrays are an hymn to that naturalness and simplicity of youth that seems to be lost in a world more and more populated by teens eager to act as grown ups as soon as possible. However, it is precisely during these so turbulent and so fast years that our malleable clay being gets its shape, at least its first one. Feeling different from everything and everyone, craving to grow up immediately and at the same time regretting not to be a child anymore, being a teen has been frustrating for all of us, but once looking back to those years the only thing we can think is how much wonderful and magic they were.
Cover: Rachel, Miu Miu Portraits, Photo Julie Greve, Fashion Lotta Volkava, Courtesy of Miu Miu