In her photography book Splint, Chessa Subbiondo captures the essence of being twenty-something: crying, masturbating, crying while masturbating. The L.A. native, who’s cultivated a loyal Instagram following for turning personal moments into strangely universal images, has a signature style—soft femininity rendered in sparse, quietly surreal settings. That perspective has earned her campaigns with Balenciaga and collaborations with internet It Girls like Trisha Paytas and Addison Rae.
In Splint, she turns her lens on a cast of famous friends, including Rachel Sennott, Lexee Smith, Devon Lee Carlson, and Salem Mitchell—and strips them of their celebrity sheen. Posed in liminal, in-between spaces—empty offices, anonymous motels in Somewhere, California—and wearing the wardrobe of the EveryGirl (classic gray sweaters, throwaway lingerie), her subjects become avatars. You see yourself in them. Or maybe someone you used to be.
Subbiondo first started posting her photography to Instagram in 2016, at age 15, just as the platform was being overtaken by Alexis Ren and Jay Alvarrez’s impossibly turquoise #couplegoals era. Social media had entered its ultra-narcissistic phase, and like many girls her age, she felt the pressure. “My friends and I would take Instagram photos of our outfits on a Friday after wearing uniforms all week at our Catholic all-girls school,” she recalls. “I’d see an outfit I loved but didn’t feel I could do justice—whether it was how I posed, my expression, or just how I wore it. But I thought, ‘This is too good to waste.’ So I started taking photos of my friends—like Beanie Boylston—wearing things or in settings I wished I could embody.”
Her work began gaining traction around 2018 or 2019. Back then, it was brighter—full of props, color, noise. But as Subbiondo began taking her art more seriously, her images grew quieter. “It’s always what I wanted to do,” she says, “but seeing people react to something I made—really seeing it—is so different from someone complimenting your looks. Praise for my work is the most gratifying feeling in the world. I’m addicted to it.”
It wasn’t until this year, though, that she felt ready to commit her work to the permanence of print. Splint is the result: stripped down, emotionally charged, and achingly bare. “Even though they’re recent, these photos don’t have a timestamp,” she explains. “It’s someone wearing a plain gray T-shirt in a room that’s not too modern, but not old enough to feel like a period piece. We edited out tattoos for that reason—they timestamp an image. Stripping those things away makes everything more emotional.” She pauses. “In my old work, I relied on props and location. This time I wanted to challenge myself. I like when you can’t quite tell where something is. Is it a bedroom? A hotel? A hallway? Where the fuck are we?”
That minimalism extends to the book’s lovingly austere color palette: black, white, gray, and flushed skin tones. “I love color, but it didn’t feel right right now,” she says. “These tones feel kind of mature. Maybe it’s my way of taking myself more seriously. Which is funny—because wearing black, white, and gray is probably what a child thinks being grown-up looks like.”
The process of growing up, of course, is rarely tidy. The book’s title is a nod to that—an ode to the bruises, heartbreaks, and tiny humiliations of girlhood. (The cover image was taken from inside Subbiondo’s car after someone cracked her windshield with their fist.) “I named the book Splint because it made me think of a splinter—something lodged inside you, irritating and hard to ignore,” she says. “But also a splint like a brace—something that holds you together when you’re broken. I’ve gone through a lot the past few years, just figuring out who I am, being a girl. This book really held me together.”
When I ask if she’d be willing to share any specific personal moments that inspired the work, she hesitates—a fair response to a near-stranger poking around in the vulnerable. Besides, the beauty of Splint is its emotional ambiguity. A cropped corner of a room, deliberately locationless. A slouchy tank dress chosen to fade into the background. Still, she opens up. “There’s one photo in the book of a distressed girl being comforted by a boy who’s crossing his fingers as he holds her,” she says. “Maybe he’s crossing his fingers for luck. Maybe because he’s lying, and doesn’t want to admit it. Maybe it’s just that he wants the moment to feel sacred. There’s so many meanings. These moments have happened to me. But the beauty of images is that they don’t need to be literal—they’re meant to be interpreted.”
What better way to capture the female coming-of-age than through a soft whisper? The experience is inherently ephemeral: sadness flips to ecstasy in an instant. Sexy and sentimental, Splint is a portrait of young womanhood—and the awkward, luminous ache of becoming.
