We live in a culture that is saturated with
media and imagery depicting the lives of
teenage girls. It is hard to go a week without
hearing about a new reality show detailing
their dramatic day-to-day lives or seeing the
most recent teen-celebrity scandal plastered
across newspapers, magazines and websites.
The tumultuous years in a young woman’s
life that were once narrated in the private
pages of a personal diary are now a pastime
for readers and viewers of popular culture.
The Girl Project was born from my own
curiosity about teenage girl life. A few years
ago it occurred to me that I knew a lot
about today’s teenage girls, despite knowing
none personally and not having been one
myself for many years. For some reason I felt
confident that I understood who these girls
were and I was amazed by how different it
seemed from my own adolescentyears. Girl-
hood had become far more sensational than
my recollection. Teen girls today seemed
like younger, hipper versions of the women
I watched on Melrose Place in the 90’s. So
shallow, soulless, mean and - most surpris-
ing of all – completely fearless.
How could it have changed so much?
Maybe I didn’t know teenage girls after all.
Maybe I just thought I did. Perhaps the
information I was receiving about them was
more fiction than reality. Instead of under-
standing teenage girlhood maybe I was just
consuming it. Maybe we all were… and are.
I decided the only way to really explore these
questions was to work in partnership with
girls. In order to understand what female
adolescence means in today’s world I wanted
to ask them to communicate their own un-
derstanding and view of themselves.
The project began slowly since I didn’t
know any teenage girls personally. In early
2007, I sent emails to everyone I knew – a
call for teenage girls living anywhere in the
United States that might want to participate
in a photography project. After my first
email blast I received the names of only two
girls. Then a few of their friends requested
cameras and so on. Next I started calling
national organizations like The Girl Scouts,
Girls Inc. and The Boys and Girls Clubs of
America (BGCA). To my surprise few people
called me back, though eventually I did get
 “It was much harder than expected to put my life into
single frame photos. But I guess that’s the beauty of t
he project – it’s real and simple but complex.”
through to some leaders of individual Girls
Inc. clubs, and managed to catch the atten-
tion of a curious woman at BGCA. In late
2008, something amazing happened when I
discovered Facebook. To date roughly 2,500
girls have received cameras and a third
have come back. The production phase
of the project will end when 5,000 cameras
have been sent out. Due to the wide reach
that social networking has given me, I
am receiving approximately 400 requests
per month, which suggests that all of the
cameras will be distributed by the end of
2009. In 2008 Kodak also responded to my
request for support. Though they would
not donate cameras they agreed to sell them
to me at a significantly reduced rate.
Here is how it works: Girls, ages 13-18,
contact me by email and request a cam-
era. Each girl has 27 frames (the standard
number of shots on a disposable camera)
to shoot anything about herself and her life
that she wants. The cameras get returned
to me by US mail, undeveloped, along with a
release form signed by her guardian. Work-
ing with my staff of teenage interns I select
images which then get scanned. All of the
4x6 proofs and negatives get coded and filed
as does a brief questionnaire that some of
the girls send back. The questionnaire is not
required for participation. I created it as
a means of gaining supplementary informa-
tion about the girls’ lives–intended to be
used as a cross reference during the editing
process.
-Kate, age 17,Austin,Texas
Diversity is a large component of the project
and therefore finding girls living in urban,
suburban and rural areas has been a focus
of mine from the beginning. By including
a diverse range of participants the project a
ccesses a diverse range of ideas. This diver-
sity is central to the editing process as it
furthers the relevance of themes, patterns
and anomalies.
The overwhelming majority of girls are not
photographers in a cultivated sense. Given
the technology they have grown up with
however, most have been taking pictures for
years. Asking the girls to communicate
photographically rather than in writing was
very intentional. Because so much of the
media representation on adolescence is visu
al, in one format or another, it made sense
to me that girls should speak using similar
media so prevalent in their lives. I have also
deliberately chosen to work with film rather
than digital because I want to avoid girls
self-editing or critiquing their own work. I
am interested in what they mean to commu-
nicate rather than their perfection of it.
Working with film is surprisingly unique for
most of the girls, many of whom have
never taken a picture without immediately
seeing the result.
I continue to be amazed by the amount of
trust girls have in me – a total stranger
Even more amazing is the faith girls have in
the project and in the millions of additi-
onal strangers that I tell them will one day
see their work. Though some girls shoot
irreverently, a large amount of girls shoot
with remarkable intent to share something –
to reveal a part of themselves. They willingly
invite unknown viewers into their private
world. I can only assume that this openness
is in large part due to the digital world they
livein. This is a generation of girls accus-
tomed to sharing their lives with people
they’ve never met outside the virtual worlds
they participate in.
What began as personal curiosity has
evolved into a personal minimission. I feel
committed to sharing these images with a
broad audience that is undeniably as curious
about teenage girl life as I was and continue
to be. Teenage girlhood is everywhere. Our
culture consumes it. Some would argue that
our culture is obsessed with it. Society looks
to teenage girls for drama, angst, fashion,
sexuality and musing and we portray them
in ways that fulfill these things Like genera-
tions of girls before them, today’s girls feel
misunderstood. Unique however, for today’s
teenage girls, is the overwhelming abun-
dance of misrepresentation. There is an
entire generation of American girls, soon to
be American women, who are being misrep-
resented everywhere. Portrayed and misrep-
resented to themselves as well as to the
society they live in. My hope is that by shar-
ing The Girl Project, a new perspective will
emerge and truth will be revealed.
Miriam Forman-Brunell, author of Girl-
hood in America, writes that “Although
girls from Pocahontas to punk rockers have
been integral to American culture, most
have been overlooked, their lives underval-
ued. Perceived as insipid and insignificant,
and essentialized as passive and pretty”.
Forman-Brunell wrote this in the context of
history, though the same could be written in
an evaluation of contemporary culture.
We live in a world where grown women
read Twilight and grown men watch Gossip
Girl. Where educated grown-upsfollow up-
dates on Miley Cyrus and the Lohan sisters
with as much dedication as the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Teenage girls aren’t just being repre-
sented in Seventeen magazine for their own
entertainment. Today they are being repre-
sented in every medium and outlet available
for society’s entertainment. According to
Time Magazine only 16% of Gossip Girl view-