Becoming subjects.

GIRLS ON THE VERGE

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

DECEMBER 8, 2007-FEBRUARY 24, 2008

In our culture the transformation of girls into women has been freighted and fraught. Young men assume responsibility with adulthood: they become active agents in society when they cross this threshold. Girls on the other hand, often move from being subjects to objects, crossing a diffuse boundary from the relative freedom of childhood into the constraints of the social space marked out for women. That is the general drift, though the evidence does not always support the theory. Feminism has changed the manner in which we represent what it means to be an adolescent girl in our culture, not least by creating more opportunities for women photographers to move to the forefront. "Girls on the Verge," an exhibit of forty photographs of young girls on the verge of becoming adults recently acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, presented an opportunity to consider this ambiguous territory.

Tina Barney is among a group of women photographers whose subject is family dynamics. Unlike Mary Cassat, who as a woman could not wander the streets alone, these contemporary artists have free reign to explore the public sphere, but choose to study the drama of the home. It is worthwhile to look at Barney's photographs in this exhibit framed by what theorists call "production of gender." According to these ideas, gender is not determined by our actual sex: femininity, for instance, is the sum total of messages we receive from institutions like the family, schools, and now the media, about how to be a female. In Marina's Room (1987), a little girl and her father sit in a room completely overloaded with quilts, canopies, ruffles, stuffed animals, and in the deep space of the shot, a closet where even more fripperies fill the pink-painted interior. This large color photograph suggests that the family who outfitted Marina's room thought that being a girl is contingent on the right accoutrements and setting, although the child's freedom seems as if it is being sucked up by the clutter of American upper-middle class girlhood. Barney revisited the girl and her father ten years later when it seems that Marina has thrown off all the ribbons and bows. They stand in the same room and the camera is placed at the same angle, but Marina stares at the camera, not quite glowering, smoking, in jeans and a camisole. Her father beside her looks harried and worn.

Revealing crosscurrents and affinities develop in an exhibit of forty photographs. Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi's series of four photos, "Converging Territories" (2004), depicts a child who is gradually covered until not even her eyes are visible, charting the movement from freedom to obscurity and anonymity as a girl becomes an adult woman. In addition to the garments and background, the woman is covered with calligraphy (some from the Koran and other sacred texts, some her own words), written on her body with henna, an herb traditionally used to dye or decorate women's bodies. These graceful photos visualize the worst fears of Westerners about the lack of identity allowed women in Islamic societies, but their proximity to the Barney photos of the girls smothered in consumer goods complicates our readings. Both American girl and Moroccan woman appear to be subsumed by culturally produced gender identities. The cultures are different; the process is remarkably parallel.

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I have always believed that Rineke Dijkstra photographs her subjects at the beach in order to take them away from the contexts and objects of material culture that normally define them. Since identity and gender are constructed by culture, the viewer, uncomfortable with the anonymity of Dijkstra's subjects, searches each scrap of clothing and gesture for clues. The subjects, despite an often vulnerable and awkward appearance, retain a linear grace and a cipher-like quality, which comes from their central placement in the view camera's frame. The large scale and overcast skies add gravity to the seven photographs variously shot in Coney Island, Hilton Head, Belgium, and Poland. Because her compositions are unique, the photographer avoids any art historical signals and her young people are neither subject nor object; instead they are captured on the brink of becoming one or the other. Interestingly, when Dijkstra adds cultural information, it is music. Annemiek, February 11, 1997 (1999) is a video of an adolescent Dutch girl (seen only as a headshot) singing an American pop song; she tries it on like an outfit that doesn't suit her. Celine Van Balen takes portraits of girls who are wearing the hijab. Their oval faces fill the frame, leaving just enough of their black scarves to mark them and set them aside, but offer scant information. Like Dijkstra's shoreline portraits, these largely decontextualized subjects reaffirm the importance of cultural definition. The conventions of aristocratic portraiture and mythology use attributes and other signs to identify the sitter and mark out their relationship to us; here we have simply a face. Dijkstra and Van Balen represent girls prior to their entry into the specificity of social definition. This liminal state has a kind of universality about it and, like all of the photographs in the collection, youth and health lend all the girls grace.

Sally Mann is represented in the exhibition by Candy Cigarette (1989), from her black-and-white series "Immediate Family." In this well-known photograph, a young girl with thick, messy, blonde hair poses on one side of the frame like a noir heroine, brandishing a candy cigarette. Her adult posture and sexy gaze embody the Lolita question--is she sexualized or sexual?--while a blurry figure on stilts moving into deep space offers a kind of surreal levity to the scene. Mann was the first photographer whose work self-consciously explored the manner in which young girls perform the gendered, sexual poses of adulthood (taking them on and off like clothes), revealing and reveling in their arbitrariness. And yet, the girls always seem sturdy beneath the props, makeup, and clothes.

Likewise, Melissa Ann Pinney's subjects seem capable and sturdy. Pinney brings compositional integrity, knowledge of color, and a Midwestern richness of light to her inquiries into the life of her daughter Emma. Among the photographs by Pinney is a series of Emma standing over a basement door, taken in different seasons in a series of years: Emma at Six, Emma at Nine, Emma at Ten, and Emma at Eleven, Cellar Door (2001-2006). In another photograph outside the same house, Emma looks annoyed with her mother, whose gently prying camera intrudes on her own self-discoveries. But she is assertive, not at all sexualized, despite the bikini she is trying on in Emma with Bikini and Roses (2007). These photographs seem to be searching for some sign of the transformation or sense of what it means to be an adolescent girl. What stands out is the relationship between Emma and her mother. Washington Park, Chicago (2000) depicts African American girls in a public beach or swimming pool shower. Unlike so many introspective or otherwise thoughtful, disturbing, or melancholy depictions of young women, Pinney captures physical pleasure, and a sense of embodiment. Summer light pours in and water splashes over flesh and surfaces while the girls laugh. It is Venus or even Susanna at her bath, to be sure, but there is no violence in the gaze, no narrative of threat. Pinney, a Chicagoan, photographs these girls in their urban moment with the same inquisitive yet nurturing eye she has turned on Emma.

Lauren Greenfield captures the struggle of a teenager wrestling with her own body in Sheena Tries on clothes with Amber, 15, in a department store dressing room, San Jose, California (1999). Sheena is frowning and squeezing her breasts so they fill out a swimsuit top while her friend looks on impassively. The Dutch angle, tight space, and harsh light and color make this performance of gender seem desperate, albeit in a very recognizable way that gives credence to Sandra Bartky's ideas about internalized feelings of deficiency in women. (1) In The Damas (maids of honor) go from the church to the reception in a Ford Explorer limousine at Ruby's quinceanera, Huntington Park, California (2001) and Alli, Annie, Hannah, and Berit, all 13, before the first big party of the seventh grade, Edina, Minnesota (1998), Greenfield pursues her inquiry into gender, race, and class with the camera, contrasting the faux luxe of quinceannera satin and the anxiety of the moment in a tightly framed photo of a group of girls in a limousine with the formidable self assurance upper-middle class Minnesota girls who clearly own their own space; the gaze picks up on no doubts or vulnerabilities.

Among other photographs in the exhibit are a group of awkward and mysteriously posed subjects by Hellen van Meene; several small, graceful silver gelatin prints of girls in swimsuits by Mark Steinmetz and Judith Joy Ross; and photographs of young Ukrainian women by Katherine Turczan, who went to Kiev to trace her family roots.