The Screen-Lit Bedroom

Evan Baden spent years photographing teenagers in their bedrooms, posing for themselves—lit by the glow of laptop screens and phone displays, taking the self-portraits that social media was just beginning to demand of them. His series Technically Intimate caught something real about that transitional moment: the new intimacy being performed for absent audiences, the strange loneliness of staging yourself in the room where you grew up. The faces in Baden’s photographs look like they’re practicing for something. The light they’re bathed in is cold and blue and very specific to 2010.