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Beauty has nothing to do with standards set by others
Zoey Xinyi Gong left Shanghai alone at sixteen. Today she practises Chinese medicine food therapy and says beauty has nothing to do with anyone
Text: Irène Schäppi
Photos: Zosia Prominska
Mila was fourteen when Zosia Prominska first photographed her. She already had an agency contract and nothing to use it for. Paris, London and New York were still years away. Prominska travelled the length of Poland for the project, found more than a hundred teenagers in the same position, and photographed them in their bedrooms. Now, seven years on, she has gone back to see what has changed.
From the outset, Prominska planned the project to run over several years. She wanted to see how her subjects’ lives would unfold, not simply how they looked as fourteen-year-old models in waiting. Seven years later, that intention is now visible in the second round of portraits. For the first shoot, the teenagers wore the latest collections by Polish designers and were styled, coiffed and made up by professionals. The rooms were left exactly as Prominska found them. Where the teens had tidied things away for her arrival, she asked for them to be brought out again and returned to their usual places: soft toys, school bags, children’s drawings, trophies, the occasional saint on the wall.
Prominska wanted to mix two worlds, she explained when the first book came out: the everyday life of a schoolgirl and the dream a modelling career holds out. Ordinarily, she said, the model is the object showing the clothes. She used the clothes to show the models instead.
The photographer knows what she is talking about. Spotted by a scout at fifteen, in Paris a year later, she went on to model for Marc Jacobs, Fendi, Vivienne Westwood and Giorgio Armani. She appeared on the cover of Polish Harper’s Bazaar. That experience shaped her perspective before she changed sides.
It was on a shoot with Mario Testino for British Vogue that she realised, after sixteen years, that she wanted to change sides. In front of the camera, she told the Swiss magazine annabelle in 2017, you feel the light, but the frame exists only in your imagination. Behind it, she can set the frame herself. What she took from those years is an eye for the person in front of the lens: “I want the person in front of my camera to feel comfortable.”
Some of those photographed for the first Future Perfect book now have flats of their own. Others still live in the same bedroom at their parents’ house. Some work as models. Others don’t, for widely different reasons: sometimes their body developed in a direction the industry has no use for; sometimes they chose something else: a degree, a career outside fashion, a family. Ewa, for one, is twenty and a mother.
These differences show how the project has opened out over time. Together, these shifts show how varied the outcomes have become. “By juxtaposing these shifts, the project demonstrates just how multifaceted these life paths are and the many ways in which early dreams can transform,” writes the journalist Weronika Pisarska in the art publication Contemporary Lynx.
The first book, Future Perfect, was published by Kehrer in 2021, with an essay by Danaé Panchaud, director of Photoforum Pasquart in Biel. Under the title “Indecisive Promises at Dawn,” she places Prominska’s portraits alongside the work of Sarah Jones and Tina Barney.
Prominska, born in Poznań in 1985, studied ethnolinguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University and photography at the Instytut Fotografii Fort in Warsaw. She won the ShowOff competition at Krakow Photomonth in 2019 and was nominated for the vfg Young Talent Prize in 2021.
Prominska’s work has been shown at the Instytut Fotografii in Warsaw, the Photobastei in Zurich and Oslo 8 in Basel, among others. She divides her time between Zurich and Portugal and is currently working on the second part of Future Perfect.
