“I’m Not a Girl, Yet Not a Woman”
I don’t know if it’s because of Britney Spear’s sister or Bristol Palin or what, but lately I have been thinking about the space females enter when they are evolving from girls into women. While young mothers are certainly a hot tabloid topic right now, I am more interested in less extreme examples of this threshold crossing. It can be argued that childhood and adulthood are biological categories, but they are also social constructs that change depending upon their historical context.
During the Industrial Revolution (pre-child labor laws), US children worked in factories, whereas today, a large percentage of college graduates move back home to live with their parents. When does a person become an adult? When does a girl become a woman? I don’t have a definite answer, but no photographer explores this idea better than Kanako Sasaki.
Kanako Sasaki/Getty Images
When I look at her photographs, I am taken to a place where innocence and experience co-exist. In this world, the subject’s age is ambiguous: she is at once child-like and emotionally nuanced, unselfconscious yet provocative:
Kanako Sasaki/Getty Images
They bring to mind Balthus’s infamous paintings of Therese.
Kanako Sasaki/Getty Images
And of course, they are beautiful to behold.
