Variety photoplays: several young, newly prominent women photographers have more in common than their rising reputations. Trained in graduate programs in the late `90s, they tend to use adolescent girls as their subjects, prefer staged scenes to candid shots and often inject narrative elements into their pictures. Below, a look at five of these emergent image-makers - Anna Gaskell, Dana Hoey, Justine Kurland, Malerie Marder and Katy Grannan

Art in America, June, 2002 by Phyllis Tuchman

Lee, Gage, Mesa-Pelly and Jones have experienced comparable levels of visibility. A book was recently published on Lee's more conceptually driven work. (6) She photographs in series and is the principal protagonist in each set, so that self-portraiture--what identity she has chosen to assume and what she is doing--is at the center of her enterprise right now [see A.i.A., Apr. `02]. Gage, who is active, as well, in the worlds of video and commercial photography, has created a number of striking pictures [see A.i.A., Nov. `00]. They tend to stand apart from one another rather than seeming to belong to a larger whole. Mesa-Pelly, whose haunting images are the subject of a catalogue published by the Photography Center at the University of Salamanca, Spain, works in a mode that parallels Gaskell's concerns. (7) And when the two women's imagery is particularly close--a view of shoes and ankles or a figure on her hands and knees looking toward the ground--you get a glimmer of what they ingested in their shared classes. But unlike Gaskell, Mesa-Pelly has a garish, almost strident color sense, and in her last solo show, she might have been better served by shooting her work in black and white. Lately, she is less involved with figures.

Jones, who lives in London, where she was born and educated, is older than the other women by almost 10 years. She has had more solo shows, has won more awards and has an extensive bibliography. Initially, she attended Goldsmiths College as a painter. Her compositions are so spare, clean and linear, it's easy to imagine that the Minimalists were an important influence on her. Jones works both indoors and out, taking pictures without figures, though many of her exteriors feature a tree as a suitable stand-in. While boys, men and even an elderly woman have posed for her, it's class distinctions that she underscores from one series to another. This concern especially sets her prints apart from those by her American colleagues. [See review on p. 122.]

Reality Shows

In the not-too-distant past, feminist theorists promoted the use of the term "herstory" to replace "history." Today's younger generation of women feels no need to transform words--nor much else--in such obvious ways. As in other areas outside the arena of art, many battles of this sort have already been fought and won.

Numerous prominent women are among these photographers' distinguished forebears. Shades of Julia Margaret Cameron and Gertrude Kasebier and countless others can be detected in their work. Staged genre scenes and costumed self-portraits were not invented by Cindy Sherman or her contemporaries. Looking at prints from the 1850s and 1860s, you can find these sorts of images in abundance. The photographers discussed here are well aware of such material. Many of the critics who write about them, on the other hand, seem unfamiliar with these historical precedents.

Gaskell, Hoey, Kurland, Marder, Grannan and others have strong ties to their generation as a whole, not just to members of the international art world. They're not the only ones staging realities. Rent the film The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola, for example, and you'll encounter similar material. Consider, too, a movie season which featured documentary-like "fiction" films such as Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Almost Famous and Nurse Betty, which at its conclusion, tries to suggest that it, too, belongs in this hybrid category. Be that as it may, these photographers are original talents who have a ready-made audience primed to respond to their eloquent, dramatic prints.