Every year since 2022, I’ve been invited to attend the Job Fair of the VUB Business Club in order to shoot professional portraits of the students who attend the fair. The idea is to make images that they can use on their CVs, job applications and LinkedIn profiles.
This year, I photographed 105 students in five hours, and delivered two or three portraits of each. The ones on this page are among my favourites.
Trying to establish – over and over again, and in just three minutes with each person – an atmosphere of confidence that allows real portraits to blossom is extremely intense, but a lot of fun, too. Most of the subjects were friendly and open, and spoke perfect or near-perfect English.
But what struck me this year was the very high levels of anxiety about their appearance that many of them exhibited, and in some cases expressed. Over the years, I’ve come to realise that almost nobody actually enjoys having their portrait made. 99.9% of us are self-conscious about some aspect of our faces or bodies. But for many of these 19- and 20-year-olds, the degree of discomfort suggested something close to trauma. I wonder if this is new – if this generation of young adults, exposed to the unforgiving gaze of social media publicity from childhood on, has actually been damaged by it.
I hope the students I met haven’t been permanently damaged. I hope the few minutes we spent together help to build their self-confidence rather than undermining it further. And I hope they enjoy the beautiful portraits we made.