Girlhood

December 2024

This series of staged photographs—created during a period marked by profound ‘growing pains’—reflects on the experience of coming of age as a woman in the world. Drawing on pictorial tropes from nostalgic Hollywood imagery, fairytales, and folklore, the series explores how we internalize the symbolic landscapes and cultural narratives that shape collective notions on what it means to be a girl.

Like stills from a one-woman-play, the scenes are lit with theatrical, almost punitive light evoking a sense of alienation, surreality, and longing. I appear as a lonesome actor performing for a faceless crowd watching from the shadows off-frame. Though I don’t explicity break the fourth wall by locking eyes with the camera (i.e., viewer), the scenes are staged and framed to suggest I am not oblivious to the spectator’s gaze and thus participate in my own objectification.

With a restrained use of props, mise-en-scène, and narrative cues, the work deliberately obscures reality—foregrounding the performative, constructed, and gazed nature of navigating girlhood.