‘Youth’ in Images – Liminality and Emancipation in Visual Biographies on Social Media

Youth, as a time of coming of age, is characterized by processes of emancipation, particularly through the detachment from family and societal self-positioning. Social media offer a playful way to shape identities, negotiate ambiguities that arise, create new spaces ‘without family’ and connect with peers. At the same time, analog photo collections remain significant for these biographical processes, complementing the digital realm.

In my presentation, I aim to explore the question of how the liminality of the life phase ‘youth’ becomes visible through image motifs and practices as a form of visual biographical work. The focus is on the visual self-presentation of a biographer in his mid-thirties. The data material is drawn from my dissertation, which is grounded in interpretative-reconstructive social research and combines image cluster analyses with biographical case reconstructions. A defining characteristic of the selected case is that a visual biography emerges, meaning that biographical communication with images takes place across several phases and areas of life, with particular emphasis on emancipation processes. I show how questions of orientation, which are usually associated with youth, are negotiated particularly on social media and can continue to be of importance in young adulthood.

The aim of this contribution is to explore youth not as a clearly demarcated life phase but to examine how biographical questions associated with ‘youth’ are negotiated with images. This offers insight into the liminality and ambiguity of this life stage, which is often difficult to define. The presentation highlights how these negotiation processes become visible in visual biographical work and how social media, in particular, provide a pictorial (rehearsal) space.