Jordan Tiberio: a new pre-Raphaelite, or something edgier? Can't wait to find out

Untitled, from "The Others"
Jordan Tiberio

My favorite thing about the internet is serendipity. Click here, click there, and the next thing you know you're scrolling down the gallery of an 18-year-old photographer whose artistic sensibility seems equal parts 1970s fashion magazine, pre-Raphaelite fairy tale, and Sigur Ros music video. Lovely young women are hardly an original topic, but Tiberio's work seems to catch a disquieted, ambivalent undertone to the beauty. Is it ambivalence about the artifice of fashion, about aging, about one's own body and sexuality? I have no idea, but I'm interested. Then there's the unapologetic uses of double exposures and other special effects: naive, or knowing?

Whether you take them as winsomely romantic, retro-hipster, or a little bit sinister, there's a lot going on in Tiberio's surreal scenes. Thanks to their photographer's relative obscurity (so far), Tiberio's photos are like mysterious illustrations from a diary written in another language. They reflect back (and distort) the viewer's own guesses and speculations. I hope we see a lot more art from Tiberio and her peers in the future - I'm just waiting for whatever's after lowbrow, and maybe this is it. In the meantime, check out her website and flickrstream and tumblr. Tiberio also recently won a contest sponsored by H&M to design a t-shirt.

Thanks to my friend Greg for the find (specifically, for re-sharing someone's post about Jordan's flickrstream to his Google+ feed. Now doesn't that sound 2011?)