BLUSH

BLUSH is a long-term documentary photography series following my two daughters—now 7 and 15—through girlhood in contemporary North American culture. It is a call to protect innocence. For the past five years, I’ve photographed real moments in their everyday lives to explore the friction between cultural conditioning and authentic voice.

I’m interested in how girls experience freedom, agency, and power in a culture that is designed to objectify, commodify, and silence them.

Girls are taught by patriarchal culture to pendulate between appearances and disappearances and to look outside themselves for validation of their own worth. Research shows that starting at age 6, girls begin to internalize cultural messages about their capability, and that between ages 8 and 14, girls’ confidence falls by 30 percent.

This project explores several meanings of the word “blush”. To blush is to flush with shame, modesty, or embarrassment, usually for failing to conform to social expectations. Blush is also a cosmetic applied to the cheeks to perform femininity. And blush is a blooming or flowering state. These meanings—shame, performance, and becoming—form the conceptual architecture of the series.