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As a child from a small Belgian farming town, Eva Verbeeck could only imagine what it was like growing up as an American teen. Then she began photographing them
Central to that fascination was a curiosity about what it might actually feel like to grow up in the US. Verbeeck wondered about the girls coming of age in a culture she had only ever experienced from a distance, and how their realities compared with the America she had imagined.
‘The idea of the “American girl” existed in my imagination long before I ever came to the US, built from fragments of images, fantasies and stories that felt impossibly far away from where I grew up. The slowness of the process created space for conversation, vulnerability and trust. The project ultimately became a way of exploring girlhood, identity and contemporary American life through the perspectives and experiences of the young women I met along the way’.
Verbeeck travelled across the US to meet and photograph the real young women who inspired her childhood daydreams, using her lens to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality. What began as a search for a familiar image developed into a much wider exploration of contemporary girlhood. Photographed between 2018 and 2024, the project took Verbeeck across 28 states.
Hundreds of girls between the ages of six and 18 participated, creating a portrait of adolescence that stretches across different landscapes, communities and experiences. Rather than casting girls to fit a predetermined idea, Verbeeck worked through open calls, schools and youth organisations, allowing participants to choose to take part. Their voices and experiences gradually determined the direction of the work. Each girl was asked to bring one object that had personal significance to them to the shoot.
Some girls chose to be photographed without any object at all, while many brought something meaningful to them, ranging from personal belongings and sports equipment to musical instruments, pets or other items that reflected their identity and interests. As the project expanded, Verbeeck encountered girls through cheerleading squads, sports teams, marching bands and other communities across the country.
These encounters became a way of discovering the many different realities of growing up as a girl in the US, and the communities that offer a place to belong while individuality begins to take shape. The photographs were made primarily using 4×5 and 8×10 large format cameras. The slow, deliberate nature of large-format photography became integral to the approach, creating space for conversation and collaboration between photographer and subject. The project extended far beyond the moment a photograph was taken.
Through interviews, recorded conversations and letters, participants spoke about friendship, family, their bodies, ambitions, fears and their ideas about the future. While the photographs are rooted in the US, the questions running through them are universal: ‘What do young people hope for as they come of age? What kinds of lives do they imagine for themselves, where do they hope to belong and who do they dream of becoming?
’Throughout the book, adolescence appears as a space between identities: between childhood and adulthood, belonging and independence, confidence and uncertainty. Verbeeck is interested precisely in this moment when a sense of self is still being written.
‘America’s Girls became a conversation between two generations of girlhood: memories of imagining America from Belgium and the realities of the girls growing up within it today. The mythology that initiated the project slowly gives way to something more complex and less easily defined. ’
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