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In black-and-white photographs, the relationships of several teenage girls unfold through after-school hangouts, late-night parties and prom photos in mid-1980s New York. They are Blake and Leslie, two Jens, Zoe and Molly, applying makeup in mirrors, deep in conversation on the subway and shielding their cigarettes from the wind. Fast forward and they have partners and children, the women weaving in and out of each other’s lives like a tangled braid.
Three decades after she began photographing the friends, the photographer Karen Marshall has published the longtime body of work in a new book, “Between Girls.”
But one face is absent just ten months into the series: the exuberant Molly, who welcomed Marshall into their lives and was the connecting thread between many of the young women. What started as a documentation of girlhood transformed into a more complicated story after Molly was hit by a car and killed while on summer vacation in Cape Cod.
“Between Girls” follows a group of girls in 1980s New York over a 30-year period. Credit: Kehrer Verlag
“I wanted to look at the emotional bonding that happens between girls at 16. That was my premise and my intention,” Marshall said in a phone interview of her initial idea. After photographing the group during their junior year, however, she didn’t know how to finish the series. “I hadn’t gotten to that yet. And I was asking that question to myself…in senior year will something be a little different? And then (Molly) died. So that put me down another path.”
Marshall met Molly through a family for whom the teenager babysat for — Marshall was in her 20s at the time and studying at the International Center of Photography (she now chairs the program she attended). Molly and her friends mostly lived on the Upper West Side, came from single-parent households, were “fiercely independent,” Marshall noted, and “had a really good sense of self.”
The body of work shifted after one of the girls, Molly,…
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Source : cnn
