A project exploring gender identity and the pressure to conform in contemporary South Korea by Polish-British photographer and filmmaker Marcin T. Jozefiak. Working between Berlin and Seoul, Jozefiak’s practice attends to the ways individuals negotiate within changing social and cultural environments. “Fearless Flowers” involved twenty-three participants in South Korea over a two-year period, examining the tension between self-definition and the social expectations that shape how bodies are allowed to exist.

“Each portrait developed through conversation and collaboration. Flowers were individually selected for each person entering the studio and placed in dialogue with their body. Traditionally associated with beauty, femininity, fragility and transience, here they resist belonging to any particular gender. They conceal and expose, soften and disrupt, becoming extensions of the people photographed. The project deliberately moves between tenderness and confrontation. Bodies are reflected, obscured, bound, fragmented or presented without protection. Masculinity can become vulnerable; femininity can reject expectations of beauty; gender can become ambiguous. Rather than searching for a fixed or easily readable identity, the photographs create a space in which contradictions can coexist.”

Marcin T. Jozefiak shared this project via the Submissions section on our site. Click here if you would like to participate.