The girls are both creative participants and collaborators. Invited by Mendelsohn to select their own clothing and stance for the portrait, each girl’s features and gestures are recorded against the same grey hand-painted backdrop. In these three-quarter length portraits, each girl looks directly into the camera. This careful and measured photographic approach bestows the girls with authority, granting them a certain power held within their gaze.

Featuring girls from a spectrum of cultural and ethnic backgrounds; disabled girls as well as able-bodied; and girls from a range of socio- economic circumstances, Being Inbetween offers an inclusive insight into this generation of girls. A personal narrative accompanies each photograph, with Mendelsohn asking the same set of questions to each of her collaborators: What is your full name? How old are you?, followed by more in-depth and emotionally- charged questions: What do you love? What is your ambition? What do you really dislike? What are your hopes for the future?

The responses are wide ranging, personal and refreshingly direct. Wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘INFLUENCER’, 11 year old Ruby proclaims that her ambition is to ‘help others be more self confident about themselves’, while 11 year old Becca affirms that one day she will ride a rollercoaster at an amusement park in her wheelchair.

When asking about their wider fears and concerns, Mendelsohn noted a change in responses, reflecting wider issues in society and anchoring the project to a specific moment in time. Responses recorded in 2014/15 encompassed worries about hunger, homelessness, loss, and war. Throughout 2019, the girls more frequently referenced the world and environment as a source of anxiety. In her final portrait of the series taken in February 2020, Mendelsohn met Lottie, who shared her growing fears over, the then widely-underestimated, Coronavirus.

Taken as a whole, the portraits offer a highly personal insight into the dreams, desires, hopes and fears of this group of unique young women, with each girl the author of her own look and artist of her own image.

Anne McNeill, exhibition curator and Director of Impressions Gallery says, “Being Inbetween is a significant and inclusive portrait of our times. These remarkable photographs are playful, yet serious; and while they are a record of our uncertain times, they are, in another way, timeless. If these ninety young girls are permitted to be who they are and what they want to be, then society and humanity will be their safe in their hands.”

An Impressions Gallery touring exhibition curated by Anne McNeill