Holly McGlynn graduated with a B.A. in History of Art and Architecture and French from Trinity College Dublin in 2005 and an M.A. in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmith's, University of London in 2009. She was selected in 2010 to exhibit solo at Matsu Photographer’s Gallery in London as well as being short-listed for the prestigious Deptford X Photography Project. Her work has been published in the Guardian, Vice Magazine, TimeOut, Film Ireland, Bellyflop Magazine, and GCN and she has exhibited in various galleries in London.
Her work largely focuses on identity, the self, and performance within different social paradigms with influences such as Cindy Sherman, Alison Jackson, and Gillian Wearing. Through both fine-art and reportage photography, sometimes juxtaposing these two styles, she explores her subject and how they engage with their surrounding environments with a view to deciphering a visual ethnography or cultural phenomenon.
Don’t judge a Facebook by its cover comprises a portrait series of several Facebook users. The first set of portraits examines the subjects in their offline habitats. The second set represents the ‘Facebook’ identity the subject postulates online and was devised as a result of interviews as well as monitoring the participants’ Facebook usage. The intention of the project was to critically explore the opportunities Facebook affords the user to plead an essentialist identity. Paradoxically, this testifies to the subject's multi-facetted nature.
