In summer 2021, the Museum Folkwang in Essen will be showing the work of Tobias Zielony in a large survey exhibition, featuring photographs and video works from the last twenty years. One of the key themes in Zielony’s artistic work is youth culture, its relationship to background, status, and fashion, and the definition of identity more associated with this in a realm where the realities of the medium are shifting. Digital culture has revolutionized the ways in which photographic images can communicate, fundamentally altering the idea of the self and self-representation. In Zielony’s works, the subjects of his pictures appear as self-aware participants in this process of interaction—engaging in a global exchange of social codes and self-images, irrespective of the cultural and social differences between the people involved.