“As I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, ma'am. And one can't be stingy with these things because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being.”

Pedro Almodovar from All About My Mother

In modern society, it’s increasingly common to wonder what it means to be women and men, as if this combination is absolutely closed in its rules. Nowadays “Gender dysphoria”, “sex reassignment”, “queer”, “gender fluid” are being more and more talked about. What's beyond the preconceptions, though?

This is exactly what photographer Francesca De Chirico (b. 1995) is trying to bring into focus in her ongoing series, "I'm Nicole", through the documentation of the long and arduous process of hormone treatment, of the dynamics of gender variance, and the concept of alienation from the own body.

The photographer meets Nicole - a twenty-year-old transsexual girl - in a lounge bar in Italy, and immediately begins an empathic dialogue destined to turn into delicate diary pages. She then records the girl's battles with sex, photographing it in a wide range of situations for the entire grueling time of the transition.

Therefore, we are offered a concise and thorough documentation, at the same time intimate, challenging and deeply sensitive, an unlimited vision of Nicole's body and of the physical changes that need to be metabolized from time to time in order to change biological sex.

It might be said that the transition is somewhat like a second puberty, with the terms of 'experimentation' or 'hyper-feminization'. Space is given not only to moments of daily life, but also to her past, to mark even more the idea of a body in the making, which is looking for its dimension in a life-long journey; in conclusion, "I'm Nicole" aims to be an invitation to seek ourselves and seek harmony between the image of ourselves that the mirror reflects and what we really are beyond reflection.