Girl Pictures (1997–2002)

Between 1997 and 2002 I staged photographs of teenage girls imagining they had run away from home and formed community together on the fringes of cities and suburbs. The work was made on extended road trips and I found girls where ever I went, either bringing them to areas I scouted or following them to the places the went to be alone. I used photography to picture a space where female experience was foregrounded and affirmed through the mutual recognition of one another. The teenage runaway narrative, borrowed from movies and literature, was a short cut to establish the girls outside the structures of domestic life and inside a world of their own making. We built forts and campfires, trespassed, ambled along riverbanks and beneath highway over- passes, where performances of delinquency and caretaking became actual exchanges of intimacy and protection. I intended for them to playact a state of communal bliss. As it turned out, the girls didn’t have to pretend. They jumped and half-skipped around each other each time we descended from the car and trekked into spaces of make-believe.