Vanity

Coco Young’s first major publication, Vanity, explores the constructs of identity within an information and image-driven context where existential ideals govern social etiquette. Young combines analogue documentary photography with digitally-produced body-scans, bringing the transformative power of technology to bear on the human exterior, deforming it from its seemingly natural state. Water—a once public and abundant resource that is now bottled, sold, and manipulated to create artificial products—provides the allegorical seedbed in which Young's explorations of the human surface take root.

Young, a former fashion model, is influenced by her own experiences in an industry where temperamental ideals of beauty encourage the desire for a self-produced public persona. Young's prototype is the mythical Narcissus and his infatuation with his own image as it appears—distorted ever so slightly—in the pool of water in which he gazes. In Young's perception, both Echo (the lover Narcissus rejects) and Narcissus' reflective pool materialize as the engrossing and immersive experiences of smartphone-powered social media.