Nora Obergeschwandner
Austria
Nora Oberschwandner (b. 1981, Austria) is a photographic artist based in Vienna. Her work explores vulnerability, identity, and the emotional states that shape our experiences, relationships, and understanding of ourselves. Her long-term projects emerge from a personal need to make visible experiences that often remain hidden: uncertainty, fear, belonging, intimacy and distance, as well as the fragile nature of human relationships. She understands photography as a form of approaching these subjects – not as a means of explanation, but as an open space for ambiguity, contradiction, and multiple perspectives.
Instagram• SERIES •
Image and subject
The series does not begin with answers, but with a shift in perspective and a doubt: Do young men today still feel the pressure to be strong, dominant, and unshakeable - or have these expectations already changed? And if so, for whom do they still apply, and in which contexts? Between digital role models and cultural counter-concepts, new and sometimes contradictory ideas of masculinity are emerging. Figures like Andrew Tate promote a return to clear codes of power, control, and status. In between, young men navigate these influences - not as a homogeneous group, but as a spectrum of individual positions and experiences. The portraits in this series were created through a female gaze. This shift in perspective changes what becomes visible: moments often hidden in classical representations of masculinity - uncertainty, intimacy, quiet rituals - move to the foreground, while performative masculinity recedes into the background.
