Charlotte Lybeer

Charlotte Lybeer was born in 1981 in Belgium. She studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Ghent and the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. 

Since 2003 Lybeer photographs the experience of today’s living in a highly artificial world. Her early works focus on the staged and controlled environments of gated communities and theme parks.

Recently she photographed people who define their identity through codes and masquerades, demonstrating membership of one group while distancing themselves from mainstream society. The subcultures are partly similar to online communities, i.e., in the respect that players construct a virtual identity. The main difference is that these trans-human identities are also adopted outside the virtual world. The people on her portraits are an example of how human beings nowadays behave, in order to fit into the image created by mass media such as film and games. 

(Source: artcontest.be)