Two Girls: My Sisters 1996-2006
An newly published book about my sisters, Emily and Abby's passage into and through adolescence. Please contact for publishing requests and details.

I just finished photographing my sisters after ten years, marked by my sisters’ graduation from high school. I drove to Boston from Philadelphia for the event only to find that only one of them was graduating. This fact symbolically represented their struggles through adolescence and the identities that they found through the process. It was both bittersweet and telling.

Rewinding ten years, I really began photographing my sisters in high school with a sort of fascination that I had these little girls in my life who were my sisters. It was always fun for me to do, but nothing I took very seriously. When I went to college, I spent a year and or so struggling with subject matter as most beginning photo students do. I would resist and resist the idea of having to have a project with some meaning until one day the most obvious thought hit me. Why not continue to photograph what I had been doing all along?

It was at this moment in 1996 when I left the amateur approach to photographing my sisters behind and embraced it as my art. At this time, I began looking at my sisters’ middle-class American lives in a fervent attempt to point out gender socialization and other imposed ills of the female gender. I would go to the suburbs with my 4x5 Speed Graphic and try to make photos that felt candid and would represent these girls in an honest, non-exploitative way. Through photographing, I began to see my sisters’ images as representative of the greater girl who held a broad definition of being playful, vain, sexual, boisterous, and brave and so many more traits.

Just as I began to establish my sisters as girls, pre-adolescence descended and absolutely changed the path of my project. On the surface I was still photographing my sisters but it was my approach that changed. I was fascinated and repulsed by new conversations of boys, makeup and weight. This led me to read any and every book I could find on the subject of adolescence and pre-adolescence. It also led me to seriously investigate my own pre-adolescent experiences, which were far less than stellar, in relation to theirs. In photographing Emily and Abby, I was also photographing how a girl becomes alien in her own body, how confidence may falter, how grooming rituals become of great importance, how relationships with friends and family change and most importantly, the quest for identity. When I photograph my sisters and when I photograph other girls I am primarily concerned with identity in our complicated media driven culture and how it manifests.

In the 10 years that I have been photographing my sisters, the camera has recorded a huge amount of changes, which are only partially physical. Emily and Abby as small girls had personality differences but they were more or less similar. Abby was scared of things like amusement park rides and showing off with made-up dances while Emily was more of a risk taker and athletic. Pre and early adolescence has made the differences between them so that I couldn’t even imaging two young women being more different. Abby is in a clique of popular girls whose main concerns are drinking, shopping, sneaking around, being mean and are definitely not academic achievement. Emily spends her time solely surrounded by males, obsessing over sports statistics, listening to Bruce Springsteen and striving to be a strong student. She has also developed an eating disorder. Their differences further illustrate how identity is shaped and formed from the passage of girlhood to adolescence.

I feel very separated from Emily and Abby’s experiences, maybe because of our age differences, maybe because of our different upbringings or maybe because I’ve been looking at it through a camera lens for the past decade. This is most likely the reason that they became less and less likely to let me photograph them in the end. I can’t imagine going through all the pain and awkwardness of my own growing up with a camera around at all times. I try to explain to them that their images are important for other people to see because it opens up dialogue and the issues of girls growing up for others. I believe that they understand this in a far off and distant sort of way and I’m hoping that as they get older they’ll begin to appreciate their lives documented in photographs.