Becoming subjects.

The works in this exhibit are at once notable photographs and important documentation of the shift in representation that has taken place during our time. "Girls on the Verge" offers the viewer an important opportunity to survey the work of women photographers who have been able to represent and redefine themselves. The inclusion of the work of a male photographer, Steinmetz, is significant in that the curator is thus able to balance her inquiry and keep the field open. The questions that the photographs pose in images parallel the inquiries of sociologists, philosophers, writers, and others who have studied gender during the last thirty years. Is adolescence the transition during which girls' bodies become useful to men as objects of desire and exchange in a patriarchal context or is this process important in a woman's life? Do women and girls present themselves to the world or are they offered up to the male gaze? Are women's photographs different than men's photographs or does the camera itself trip some balance? Some of the photos seem to point to answers regarding the contested categories of girlhood, childhood, and the tricky relationships between subject and object. Others suggest that after all we have learned about femininity, women's bodies, gender, and culture, many of the girls in these photos remain as elusive and enigmatic as ever.

JANINA CIEZADLO is a writer and artist who has taken many photographs of her own daughter.

NOTE 1. Sandra Bartky wrote an important essay, "Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," widely read in the 1990s, arguing that Foucault's concept of discipline applies only to men. She then applied his concepts of social control to women contending that patriarchal cultural messages (discourse) constructs women's bodies as deficient. Hence dieting, clothing, and other time-consuming attempts at becoming acceptable are a form of social control of women's bodies that result in keeping them "docile."