The faces behind the feeds: Gen Z’s private lives and public posts – in pictures

For the first digital natives, there are two places to express yourself: in the comfort of your own room and online. Photographer Niccolò Rastrelli set out to find out how the identities compare

Social media arrived just as I, a younger millennial, was on the brink of teenhood. My friends and I signed up for accounts on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, as well as less remembered sites such as the now defunct Bebo. We didn’t know what we were doing; no one did. We posted indiscreet messages and photos on public feeds that we wouldn’t want any future employer – or really anyone, for that matter – to see. Then gradually we, and our parents and their parents, too, learned what it means to live with that world-changing phenomenon that we term social media. We started to find different ways to adapt, a process that is ongoing.

But what is the experience like for gen Z, the first generation of “digital natives”, for whom the language of the internet is a mother tongue? That is the question that led the Italian photographer Niccolò Rastrelli to embark on the project IRL (the online acronym, of course, for a phrase denoting our offline existences: in real life).