She examines photography as a cultural tool that forms an integral part of our daily life. Using a variety of techniques, that range from laser cutting to embroidery, she pushes the material boundaries of photographic media and turns photographs into palpable objects. Lilly deconstructs photographic media to shift the perception from the visual surface to the material, technical and social structures inside which they are embedded.
Her current projects explore the influence of the smartphone on our everyday photography culture and our collective social behavior. Drawing from photography history, media theory and sociology Lilly reads images as testimonies of popular culture, but also as means of normative control and social surveillance. These functions are at the beginning of photography’s history and find their continuation in today’s techniques of face recognition, location tracking, commercial and political targeting.
