growing pains

I'm not sure why shots of girls hanging around looking darkly girly in the way only girls of a certain age can are intriguing me so this weekend. But I've always been sort of fascinated by images inspired by the rites of girlhood and the complexities of clique-dom in girls, perhaps because I was a product of an all-girls school (10 years!). There are subtleties to their interactions that seem mysterious - there's something naive, calculating, and impenetrable about the whole thing. I think I'm sort of romanticising and getting nostalgic about my years of girlhood but I think there's something about the friendships made during those years that standout from the friends I made after that. There's something about girls at this age that border on cruelty, maybe because we tend to be childishly manipulative at that age. The images of girls standing alone and smoking also reflect the sort of isolation you can feel at the time - the angsty 'nobody understands me' feeling one gets from time to time when you're a teenager with no real responsibilties and too much time on your hands after school. In short, there's something a little precarious and heartbreaking about teenage girls that I find very poignant, and I suppose when I see it so beautifully rendered in photographs, it tugs at my heart a bit. Those bygone years!

Pictures shot by Michael Thompson from http://community.livejournal.com/foto_decadent/1543544.html#cutid1