Adolescence is a complex and sensitive age when teenagers start seeing themselves in the context of society and start questioning their identity. It marks an important physical and psychological change and is not only a time of unease and expectation, but also of freedom.

In my images I try to capture this change. I place girls, who are not professional models and whom I don’t know very well in an unfamiliar environment, and ask them to pose in a certain way. This results in a slight awkwardness that is a part of being a teenager. However, as the shoot develops, the girls become more confident and their faces begin to reveal both childlike and adult expressions, which I find fascinating.        

Most of the girls are photographed individually, which reflects the loneliness often experienced at that age. I relate to the situations in which I place the models, as though I am re-living scenes from the past, but transposed to a more modern environment. There is a certain mischievousness in these situations I set up that stems from growing up in a larger family.

I often see youngsters just staring into space, immersed in their own thoughts and fantasies. Putting the girls in this surreal setting stresses the importance of day-dreaming, inhabiting an imaginary world, which at this age often seems bigger and more real than the suburban surroundings. In their fantasies, girls are much more powerful than in their every day lives and that is why the idea of them towering over houses and streets appealed to me. It was also important for me to show the girls involved in the context of their daily lives, such as picking up a milk bottle from the front of the house, or walking down the street with a shopping cart, looking after a baby brother. I wanted the images to have a slight air of oddness, reflected by the way the scenes are lit, or ambiguity in some situations – such as the girl lying down across the street with eggs spilling on the road, or the girl in a school uniform wading in the pond.

I find it important to relay a sense of freedom that we enjoy in our home environments. In the United States, where I spent my childhood, it used to get very hot in the summer, so I would run around the house in swimwear all day, even when picking up milk in front of the house. I think carefully about the clothes and props, how they affect the figure and work with the textures and colours within the image