"Bubblegum": Gum as a symbol of youth

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week is the "Bubblegum" series by photographer Emily Stein, who studies the transience of adolescence by telling teenagers to blow a bubble out of gum.

At university I studied the visual arts and painted three years in a row. In my last year, I took a camera to a parking lot with trailers, where I did a fashion project with the girls living there. They were simply obsessed with styling and being photographed. The way they reacted to the camera, how they were revealed, was incredible. In general, that's how it happened - I fell in love with photography, there was no way back anymore. I consider my photos to be the result of relationships that I bring. Photography is the most incredible tool that allows you to touch the lives of people that you would not have met under any other circumstances. Thanks to the pictures, I relive my youth and imagine my future.

Bubble is a series of portraits of teenagers that I shot on the beach in New York in the summer of 2013. The transience of youth has always been a popular topic in the history of western painting. Within the symbolic language of this tradition, bubbles represent the transience of life. Bubble meets this tradition, while the chewing gum itself is used as a tool that allows you to get the most different facial expressions from the young participants. Thus, the series reminds us that youth is not necessarily something that we value for being transient, but also something that needs to be valued for spontaneity and individuality.

I also take pictures of older people too: these pictures tell of old age, but in the key that old age is a joy, these are bright people who have only become better with age. I myself am not afraid to grow old. I like the poem "The Warning" by Jenny Joseph. It is about how to become less reasonable and less conformist when you're on the verge of old age. When I get old, I plan to behave and do things without looking at the others, and laugh without embarrassment.