At Photo Elysée, 66 young photographers show what happens when a generation tells its own story, without explanation or apology.
Sara Messinger
At a moment when Gen Z is often framed through panic and prediction, Photo Elysée offers something simpler: attention. Gen Z: Shaping a New Gaze, on view in Lausanne until February 1, 2026, brings together 66 photographers from across the world, mostly born between the mid 1990s and 2010. The exhibition does not try to sum up a generation. It gives it room to speak.
Curated by Hannah Pröbsting and Julie Dayer, the show moves through themes that feel lived rather than packaged: family legacy, chosen communities, the pressure of self image, gender, intimacy. Many of the projects start close to home, in bedrooms and bathrooms, among friends, in moments of isolation or closeness. It makes sense. If your world shrank during the pandemic, your face, your body, your room became your first studio.
Fatimazohra Serri
The exhibition also refuses the usual museum distance. Most works are unframed, mounted directly or installed as wallpaper. The wall texts come from the artists themselves, not a curatorial voice translating their intentions. That decision shifts the tone immediately. You are not being told what to think. You are being invited to look, and to listen.
What stays with you is the sense of agency. These photographers are not arriving as subjects to be analysed. They arrive as authors, shaping their own archive in real time. The work is personal, but it never feels small. Emotion travels. Recognition does too.
Claudia Fuggetti
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