Youth might be wasted on the young, but you wouldn’t think that to see Fumi Nagasaka’s spirited and personality-filled photographs of teenage girlhood. In her new photobook, Teenage Riot, recently published by Bywater Bros. Editions, the New York-based image-maker presents a warm-hearted study of four teenage girls in their individual environments — Maxine, a student based in Ontario, Canada; sisters Isabella and Alana from Bushwick, New York; and Fubuki, a student from Tokyo. Created over a number of years, Teenage Riot documents the intimate moments of adolescence, the little moments — applying makeup for a party, hanging out with friends, experimenting with clothes, going to school — that feel so major and important as a teenage girl. Nagasaka, who is originally from Japan, refers to these daily experiences as the “small riots” in a teenage girl’s life — the minor successes, the quiet rebellions and little transgressions that are magnified through the prism of youth.
Following on from Untitled Youth, a 2016 compendium of teenage portraits, Teenage Riot progresses from the individual study to present a sustained and personal documentation of four individuals. By looking at girls from different locations, their similarities as well as their differences become strikingly apparent. In this way, Teenage Riot is not just a tender and thoughtful visual account of girlhood, but is an eye-opening cultural document too. Nagasaka’s ability to render the unremarkable as remarkable makes Teenage Riot particularly noteworthy; she shirks the performative, stylised and over-the-top in favour of presenting her subjects as they truly are. And somehow, that in itself feels quietly radical.
Teenage Riot, published by Bywater Bros. Editions, is out now.