#thread: mirela

[fairytaletold]

@striigon // continued.

Her mother had called her foolish for this. She had known. Long before Mirela herself could work up the courage to bring up the subject, her mother had known exactly what he was, the sign of the cross warding it off even as she whispered it. Strigon. A woman born with suspicion deep in her bones — she had learned these stories on her own mother’s knee, and there had been no convincing her otherwise. But that had not been the moment she cut her daughter out of her life, neat as the bruise in the flesh of an apple. No — that had been in the damning silence that told her mother she already knew. And that she had chosen him regardless.

Perhaps she was foolish for this. She had invited Death through her door; did she truly expect to remain unscathed? Something is wrong with him this evening. Something has chilled the air in the room, drawing goosebumps over her skin. Dare she ask? Would he tell her, even if she did? He extends a hand between them, and the choice is made infinitely more simple. Either she wants him — or she doesn’t. But wanting him would always come with a risk.

She takes the step needed to reach him. Places warm fingers within his grasp, cold. ❛ Mat — what is it? ❜

[fairytaletold]

Liar, she thinks ruefully, but there is no malice in it. She hopes one day he can confide in her, and it's much less about her desire to know the answer than it is about him. More than anything, Mirela hopes so desperately that one day, he will let someone in — no matter who that person is. For his own sake, she hopes he finds someone to take some of the burden that she watches crushing him with every breath, and every day.

❛ Hmm. ❜ There is life in his eyes now, at least. They have traded the vacant, haunted look for a brighter shade of green. ❛ I hope this isn't flattery, just so I will fix your jacket. ❜ Yes, she had seen the miserable way he'd looked as she peeled it from him. Eyes flicker down to his hand. Her free fingers come to trace the hand connected to her, drawing with a painter's grace up his forearm, damp bicep, then back. ❛ Because I have already decided to help. It is selfish, though, ❜ she adds on, somberness attempting to stifle the way levity dances in her eyes, ❛ so don't thank me. I just happen to find you very handsome in that coat. ❜

HE HEARS HER shift to sit with him and tilts his head in her direction. It's a while longer before his eyes open again, spurred by the sound of her voice. What is he thinking? It's difficult to know, to contextualize it for her. There are a great many things churning in his mind, all of which he struggles to put into words. How he wants to take her and flee back to Croatia - but he wouldn't be welcomed there either, really, his own fault for causing such a ruckus so many years ago. How he wants to sink his fangs into the throats of each and every person here, render this place a ghost town - but she would never look at him the same way if he went on the real, honest-to-God massacre that he knows he's capable of. How he wishes to stay in this tub forever, hiding from the rest of the world that has done its best to ruin him completely - but she wouldn't like that either, and he wouldn't be able to resist her attempts to get him out.

HE THINKS FOR a long while, staring at the opposite wall, before blinking and turning his gaze to her. "I am thinking that I am a lucky man," is his quiet response, lifting his hand closest to her from the water. His pinky brushes against the back of her arm, like even now he's worried about staining her.

[buscarparamivida]

❛  ...this what family's s'posed t'be like ?  ❜

@quick-drawn

"Por supuesto," she answers with a bright smile that seems to dim only with the clouds she sees behind his eyes.

Her brow furrows and her expression falls.

"…… You 'ave not 'ave this… 'ave you? Es always been only you y tu mamá?"

A beat.

"I do not remember many things of mi mamá. I 'ad only… tres años ––ah, three years when she pass. Y mi papá pass three years after that. Our Tío care for us, until he die… Pero, always I 'ave 'ad Arman. Teo, too, after he was born."

She turns then, to look toward where Arman is currently carrying Teo over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, as though he weighs nothing despite his own wiry frame. This is, of course, done while inquiring where his younger brother had gone and calling for him because there is work to be done. Teo seems to be caught somewhere between indignance at being treated in such a manner and laughter brought on by his brother's apparent good humor today.

"Our familia es small––more small now than it was––pero we are close. I do not know what Teo y yo would 'ave done without Arman… Ignore 'ow much I tease him because he need it… He 'as been more a father to us than our own… I do not think that any of us would know what to do without each other."

She looks to Cole then, reaching out to place a hand on his shoulder, a more subdued but no less earnest smile returned.

"Y, ahora, la familia tiene dos más––Which es to say that now we 'ave two more we… add to our family, ¿de veras?" she says, giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze as her smile further brightens.

"Bienvenido a la familia, hermano."

[rxtualistic]

i have been trying to get my muse back but it's been harder than i thought. i usually don't drop threads but it's been so long that i have lost muse for some characters altogether. so under the cut there is a list of the threads i'm dropping. if you would like to do something new, either with the same ship or other, let me know! if not i totally understand, it's been a long time!

@stormbrews - huxley and cece

@scftdevil - aberdeen and vincent, tobert and coen

@melancholystories - monique and azar

@somethingscft - nia and eoghan

@champagns - ethan and carina

@lilacwiine - oliver and molly

@bloodrodeo - tobert and trent

@seolinah - phoebe and danielle, mateo and christine

@finclgicls - ginny and juniper, simone and min jun, adrita, noelle and elliot

@ofginjxints - graham and rachel

@writtenwillow - josephine and evan

@silvrmoon -ethan and blair

@proverbialsaints - gabriel x serena

@camilish - evan x mirela

@persephonyed - evan x malia

[mirelacarter]

Location: The Met steps Open to anyone 

Oh, the joy of the final trimester. Mirela thought she was prepared for the challenge, after all she read all the books and articles Enzo sent her, and she had handled the first trimester already. But those annoying Braxton Hicks contractions were a real pain in the ass. Speaking of ass, she had constantly pain in her lower back, that could only be eased during pilates. Her ankles were twice bigger, the baby bump changing her petit form into a frame she was still adapting how to move around. Not to mention the sore wrists, sometimes she felt like she lost her strenght and would drop whatever she was holding. 

She felt the sting while she was walking down the museum steps, ready to finally be heading home. All of the folders she was holding fell on the groud, except for one. Her purse survived the fall, hanging safely on her other arm. “This is fucking amazing”, she laughed nervously, on the brim of tears while she watched her things on the ground. The idea of leaning down to collect all of her stuff with her 30 weeks bump was terrified. She’d might as well stay on the ground and wait until she was strong enough to push herself up.

[someotherdog]

it was kinda hard not to imagine. that was a bit of a relief, honestly. gideon thought he was the only one that spent all his hours imagining things, but that was the nature of the author. he spent a lot of time crafting narratives, storylines, dialogue, to the point that he sometimes planned out conversations or scenarios with people in his real life. clearly not this conversation, though. no, this one was totally off the cuff. the moment he said it, he expected mirela to admonish him. instead she seemed almost... amused by him. he didn't know if that bothered him or made him feel better. at least she wasn't throwing him out of her engagement party, though he supposed she wouldn't have been blamed if she did.

he smirked slightly at the memories of their younger selves, with mirela following after him while he ran away with his buddies, snickering like the little assholes they were. at the memory of their younger selves, when he started to actually feel bad for being a little asshole and her actually accepting his apology. they had been friends for such a fleeting amount of time, then their lives went off in different directions and truthfully, he hadn't spared much of a thought on mirela and their bygone summer afternoons. he smirked slightly at the idea that she conversely hadn't totally forgotten him, but it dropped quickly. silly little fantasies, indeed.

even if those silly little fantasies had been real, if gideon had stayed behind and became her boyfriend before her current betrothed could've slid into her life, they probably wouldn't have stayed together long. as much as she liked him when they were kids, as much as he secretly liked the attention while simultaneously badmouthing her to his friends, they wouldn't have lasted. his entire adult life had been a revolving door of lovers, largely by his own doing. she didn't deserve a man like him, that's why she had a man like him. gideon's gaze snapped from her fiancé to her face, brows creasing in the middle. "hey, that's not true!" not entirely, anyway. "i did like you, i just... i just cared about my reputation more, so i couldn't admit it." he looked away, suitably ashamed. shrugging, he took another quick swig, "not that it matters, though. we were just kids then. we're mature adults, now." gideon bumped her shoulder with his own, smiling. "i'm glad you're happy, mir." he just wished that he was happy, too. "i was just feeling nostalgic, i guess. sorry."

" sometimes , " mirela answers honestly , swirling the wine in her flute and making herself more comfortable on the front steps . she takes a slow sip before catching his eye . " when i feel nostalgic and think back on the times , my silly little ol' lovestruck highschool self wishes it were you . when we get into fights , a small part of me can't help imagining what it would've been like if i was engaged to someone else . if it was you , instead . you were my biggest and longest crush , after all ! it was kinda hard not to imagine . "

and he was . that small crush she had on him growing up lasted until highschool . and when she thinks of finally giving up , he apologizes . they had become friends . much like any other crush - drunk teenager , her hopes are rekindled and she often imagines what it would be like to be in a relationship with him . nothing had come of it , and they moved on . they grew up and lived separate lives . it's only until recently , when her mother mentions talking about her engagement to their old neighbors , does she think back on it . gideon is a sight for sore eyes . he's definitely matured , and time had treated him well .

" but that's all they are . silly little fantasies and what - ifs . my silly crush is long gone , and you never even liked me in the first place . "

[daughterofsinsloth]

do you know any soukoku fanfics that has chuuaku friendship? thank you in advance

hello anon-chan! im terrible sorry for the loooooong wait! 

here is your fics!

A (Not So) Ruined New Years by Cour104 :

Dazai gets drunk at a joint new years eve party between the agency and the port mafia. Guess who gets roped into watching him?

Lead Me To Brighter Futures by hypermoyashi :

Dazai was a convicted felon, who took a plea bargain when he was sixteen that landed him years of house arrest. Chuuya, the police officer in charge of him, wanted to give him something better, if only temporarily.

“eventually… you just move on.” by wolflegend :

Chuuya and Akutagawa have a discussion about Dazai.

The Red Thread of Osamu Dazai and Chuuya’s Nakahara by TheSilverHunt3r :

The Red Thread of Osamu Dazai and Chuuya Nakahara. Red thread of fate AU, Platonic!Soukoku, Oneshot.

No Longer Human by Gardenia (LycorisSoul) :

Dazai has to make an important decision that could jeopardize all his efforts in the past four years, but it was his partner who makes the choice for him.

The Gift War by SapphireDragon2708 : 

A series of gifts being exchanged between one another, escalating until Dazai decides to take pity on the Shin Soukoku and shoves one on top of the other.It begins with a gift. It ends with a kiss.

Follow You by mirela :

“Tonight you vanquished an entire organization, when I only asked for you to scare them a little bit,” Mori said, standing up from his chair and resting his hands on the smooth surface of his desk. “Thus I shall officially name you Soukoku, the deadliest duo in the Port Mafia."Both boys bowed even lower, saying their gratitudes automatically, almost like robots. Chuuya suppressed the urge to rush out of the Boss’ office and straight to Kouyou."Welcome, Double Black, to the Port Mafia.” [ON HIATUS]

and thaaaats all! even if i took a long of timw please enjoy reading them and tell me what you think!

 be well:)

have a nice day!

[anamedblog]

From Istanbul to Constantinople

by Mirela Ivanova, ANAMED Post-Doctoral Fellow (2021­–2022)

Photograph: David Hendrix 

November 2021 saw two exhibitions about Byzantium open simultaneously at the Pera Museum, a mere few hundred meters away from the ANAMED research center which had come to be my temporary home. Despite their obvious differences, there was a strong thematic unity between the two. Both were interested in Byzantium as an object of study and an object of the imagination, and not with the factual histories of the medieval Roman emperors.

On the top floor, and open until March is What Byzantinism is This in Istanbul? Byzantium in Popular Culture. The exhibition traces the refractions of Byzantium from video games, graphic novels, and sci-fi fiction to high fashion runways and metal music.

And whilst I recommend this exhibition wholeheartedly, I want to dwell on the other Byzantium, the one found in Brigitte Pitarakis’ exhibition From Istanbul to Byzantium: Paths to Rediscovery, 1800–1955. Also open till March, this exhibition traces the re-emergence of Constantinople in the historical imaginary of Istanbul. From the mid-nineteenth century, when Sultan Abdülmecid took an interest in restoring the Hagia Sophia, a long process of monumentalization began, which transformed organic urban landscapes into objects to be observed and visited. This transition was absolutely formative to the modern fabric of Istanbul.

This late nineteenth-century moment in which objects of everyday life became objects of conscious historical monumentality has been elsewhere termed the nascence of modernity. In his study of the use of the ruins of Ancient Greece in Greece, Yannis Hamilakis, discusses the difference between what he calls “indigenous” archaeology and modernist archaeology.[1] He gives the example of a caryatid statue formerly thought to be of Demeter, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The statue was found in the village of Eleusis, in Attica, by the Cambridge scholar Edward Clark in 1801. Prior to him removing it from Eleusis, the villagers had developed a peculiar relationship with the marble figure. Because of its decorations, the villagers assumed it to be a deity of harvest. So they buried it in dung, and turned to it for good weather each year. Their praxis was fused with Christianity. A burning lamp would be lit before the statue on Christian feasts, as is normally done with icons. The view of Edward Clark was that the villagers did not appreciate the statue correctly: that they were simply mistaken. For him, the only way of understanding the statue was as an ancient monument to Demeter, and the only appropriate way of engaging with it was cleaned up from the feces, in a whitewashed museum room, preferably in Cambridge. A number of interesting threads emerge from this story which Hamilakis teases out with great dexterity–not least the fact that Edward Clark’s own perceived superior understanding of the statue as Demeter was in fact later proved to be incorrect. But as Hamilakis rightly notes, it is by no means the case that the villagers’ engagement with the statue is simply a mistake: their engagement with it is, in his words, a kind of archaeology. Their relationship with the statue was creative, and it opened up new words of understanding and praxis which are just as valuable an object of study as the statue’s original intended significance.

The beauty of the exhibition  From Istanbul to Byzantium, is that it catches, in motion, the same process on the streets of Istanbul. In a fantastic array of images, we see how the cityscape shifts from, for lack of a better word, “indigenous,” or pre-self-conscious engagement with the medieval remains around it, to a structured exhibition approach interested in recovering the original shapes and meanings of its objects, like Edward Clark did with the statue from Eleusis. In some instances, the exhibition captures this transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, or from life to history, with extraordinary precision.

A photograph from the early 1850s displays the dusty uneven plain of what used to be the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Two men are in a heated exchange over a table. Wooden houses hover in the background. Somewhere amidst this image, half buried by the uneven sand stands the Theodosian Obelisk, an ancient Egyptian monument brought to the imperial capital in the fourth century by Emperor Theodosius I and placed upon a lavish base with a bilingual Greek and Latin inscription. In the photo the inscription is mostly under ground level, covered in dust. A man sits slumped on the Obelisk’s base, his feet dangling over the fourth century text. One is reminded of Pieter Brueghel’s “The Fall of Icarus”: a man pushes a plough cart in the foreground, a shepherd tends to his sheep, some ships sail peacefully on the horizon. Yet somewhere in the distance, something of extraordinary import to the observer of the image goes unnoticed: Icarus falls from the sky. The bilingual inscription of Theodosius I lays buried in the ground!

Less than a decade later, in 1856 another image was taken of the same space from nearly the same angle, after the excavation work of British archaeologist Charles Newton. Some things have remained the same: a man with a table of goods looks away from the Obelisk uninterestedly awaiting custom. Yet, the difference is immense. The dusty ground has been levelled. The earth around the Obelisk has been dug up. The inscription has been revealed. And most importantly, that universal symbol of museumification has appeared: a barrier stands around the Obelisk. Stand back! Look! Do not touch! This is no longer a part of the living and changing urban fabric, this is now a frozen monument of history.

But earlier image begs so many questions. What did that man resting on the Obelisk base think the ancient monument meant? Did he wonder about the text beneath his feet? Was it noted, noticed? Were there myths and legends about how the Obelisk got there, what it could do? And how were the rest of the surviving monuments of medieval Byzantium engaged with by the communities that lived in Istanbul in the nineteenth century? What “indigenous” archaeologies surrounded the Boukoleon Palace or the Galata Tower? Was anything covered in dung?

One small vignette from contemporary Istanbul may give us a glimpse. In the Fatih district of Istanbul, a short walk from the Viaduct, lay the ruins of the Church of St. Polyeuktos. It was built in the sixth century by the Roman aristocrat Anicia Juliana. It narrowly predated Hagia Sophia, which it only seconded in size and splendor. After its abandonment in the thirteenth century however, it lay buried underground for over five hundred years, to be rediscovered accidentally in the 1960s during the engineering works for an overpass. Thus, the building bypassed the late nineteenth century moment of museumification to be spat out into a late twentieth century world, a world which was much less interested in revising the canon.

The ruins are remarkable, even after decades of looting. They reveal mostly the underground corridors of the church and lay in the open air: you can walk through them at any time of day. A slim metal fence forms an enclosure, but the door is never locked nor particularly insurmountable. There is no ticket office, no museum, no security. 

The ruins have thus spilled over into the park adjacent. Marvelous capitols sit next to benches and swings, their flat square tops clearly used as tea tables over the years. A large standing column hovers over four bins by the road.

One part of the ruins is a covered shelter, resembling an arched cave. Perhaps it is an old relic chamber which stood under the main church floor. If you walk through the complex today, you might catch a glimpse of sleeping bags and belongings stored inside. If you go in the evening, you may also see the people who have been driven to living inside the ruins. They are almost all men, some much older than others. I wonder what they make of living in one of the grandest monuments in sixth century Constantinople. What is Constantinople to them? How different is it to the Constantinople of the man resting on the Obelisk base in the 1850s?

These are all stories of Byzantium, and they are all stories that must be told. The two exhibitions on offer at Pera are an important step to a broader critical engagement with the recent history and contemporary life of our remains and what they mean to the people that use them.

Mirela Ivanova’s co-edited book with Benjamin Anderson, “Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?” will be out with Penn State University Press this year and engages with some of the questions of heritage and the history of Byzantine scholarship raised above.

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[1] Yannis Hamilakis, “Decolonizing Greek Archaeology: Indigenous Archaeologies, Modernist Archaeology, and the Post-Colonial Critique,” in A Singular Antiquity, eds. D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (Athens: The Benaki Museum, 2008), 273–84.

[internetbasic9]

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls https://ift.tt/2C9xjLF

Nature

LENS

The New York Times asked 22 young women to take photos for a project exploring daily life for girls around the world who are becoming adults this year.

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Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale, Miss., visiting where she grew up.CreditCreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

TiKa Wallace is not your typical New York Times photographer.

She’s 17, competes in slam poetry events and describes herself as “an amalgamation of creative witticisms, music references and chocolate.” Raised by a single parent from a blue-collar background, this “young, queer, black girl” attends high school in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.

She is, as she puts it, “a square peg in a round hole.”

She is also among 22 young women who took photos for the project “This is 18,” which documents girls around the world. And now she has been published in The New York Times, in a special section devoted to exploring what life looks like for girls turning 18 in 2018. The project goes online today and will appear in print next week.

“What surprised me is that a major news outlet that is consumed by millions of people all over the world is allowing teenagers to tell teenager stories,” she said. “Normally, when a story is told, especially for a major news outlet, it’s told by someone who’s 30 or 40 years old. It’s just seen from a different lens versus when your peers get to tell your story.”

Staff photographers for The New York Times usually have several years of professional experience at other news organizations, and even then, they usually have to wait awhile before they get to work on projects. But the visual journalists like Ms. Wallace whom we enlisted for this project were decidedly different. They were young women, mostly teenagers.

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Mahak Naiwal with her friends at her home in New Delhi.CreditShraddha Gupta for The New York Times

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Liana Sharifian, among few Iranian women who play the bagpipe (ney-anbān), and her friend Miad play folk music from southern Iran.CreditAtefe Moeini for The New York Times

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Maryclare Chinedo and her mother in the Bronx before departing for Brown University.CreditJulie Lozano/Bronx Documentary Center

Jessica Bennett, the paper’s gender editor, realized early on that the key to success for this project was going to be getting an authentic view of the lives of 18-year-old girls. She and Jodi Rudoren, associate managing editor for audience — in collaboration with a team of editors and designers in Styles — decided the best way to assure that authenticity of experience was to have teenage photographers take the pictures and conduct interviews.

The project, managed by Sharon Attia, a 23-year-old photographer herself, became less hierarchal because most of the young women also choose their subjects.

The team behind the project paired each photographer with a mentor to help them complete the assignment and to make it a learning experience.

We asked the photographers to find the girls, photograph and interview them, and make videos of their subjects, as well. Although the photographers were mostly in their late teens, they were asked to act like professionals. And they did.

So how do you find a couple dozen talented female teenage photographers from all over the world? Well, let’s say it takes a village — a global village. Sandra Stevenson, the project’s picture editor, and I relied on a global network of photographers, editors and teachers that we have compiled over decades.

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Lori’anne Bemba, center, with her sister and grandmother at a family wedding in Montreal, Canada.CreditAdele Foglia for The New York Times

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Sage Grace Dolan-Sandrino at Bard College in New York.CreditTiKa Wallace for The New York Times

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Obdulia González González embroiders beside her artesanal craft stall in Zacatecas, Mexico.CreditJesse Mireles for The New York Times

The team decided not to take a set approach, but it did try to choose 18-year-old female subjects with various experiences from a variety of places. For the most part, it was an organic process, because it was led by the young women. And it was often an educational experience for the photographers, as Adèle Foglia, a 21-year-old photographer from Montreal, noted.

“What surprised me the most about this project was to realize how differently the world all experiences this transition to adulthood,” she said. “And also it pushed me to reflect on my own experience and to see how sometimes the world may be such an unwelcoming space for women who have dreams and the determination to realize those dreams.”

Many of the photographers felt empowered by the project and the opportunity to highlight their own concerns in their own communities.

Jessie Mirelas, 19, who grew up in Zacatecas, Mexico, has always been proud of living in “a diverse multicultural country with great architecture, great destinations and an exquisite gastronomy — a place where the peoples that preceded us remain alive.”

She photographed Obdulia González González, an 18-year-old who is part of the indigenous Wixárika people of northern Mexico. She helps her parents sell traditional crafts and hopes to attend college.

“I believe this project is important because it’s giving us a voice, an opportunity to tell our story not only just in Mexico, but to the world,” said Ms. Mirelas, who studies at the University of Veracruz and wants to become a journalist. “To be able to show the legacy and cultural heritage of our indigenous peoples who are often neglected or ignored.”

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Madison changes her son’s diaper.CreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

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Yasmine Malone photographing Madison as she looks through her journals and art.CreditChandler Griffin

Yasmine Malone, who turned 20 this month, grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta and is now a student at the University Of Mississippi in Oxford, majoring in English and political science. Using just the camera in her phone, she documented Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale.

“I saw much of my mom and sister in her when she spoke about these things, being that they have all experienced being a teen mom in poverty with limited resources,” she said. “The frequency of this story is where it’s power stems. Madison Justice is not alone in her struggle; plenty of teens deal with it. Their stories deserve to be told for not only the realness of it all, but for its humanity, perseverance and strength.”

When many think of the Delta, they think of “poverty, crime, gun violence and low health rates,” Ms. Malone said. She learned that “we all have a story worth telling” which, over time fosters hope in her community. “If we can find our common threads,” she said, “we’ll realize the gaps between us are not that big, and there is where real social change can happen.”

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Millie Landewee, a member of an all-girl skate crew in Melbourne, in her bedroom.CreditEremaya Albrecht for The New York Times

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Shama Ghosh with her sister-in-law’s baby.CreditTahia Farhin Haque for The New York Times.

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Wanjiku Gakuru in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi.CreditSarah Sunday Moses for The New York Times

Some of the young photographers already had a mentor, but for the others, we asked photographers in their country to take on the role. Sandra provided guidance on how to take photographs and monitored the progress of participants to keep them on track. For three months straight, she was like an air traffic controller on the day before Thanksgiving — with some of the pilots speaking languages she did not understand.

For many participants, the project was a crash course in documentary photography and filmmaking: Make wide shots so we can see where you are, and also details. Photograph them hanging out with both friends and family and in their rooms alone. And be sure to collect family photos. Oh, and make a video of them, too.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Attia teamed up with editors from the Styles section and digital and print designers to curate all the material and present it as a zine.

At the beginning, each photographer was asked to find three different 18 year olds. We asked them to not choose their friends and to send us a brief bio of each subject and a few photos of them in their rooms. The team then chose one of those subjects for each photographer.

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Aleksandra Yuryeva with her younger sister and friend at a park in Moscow.CreditAnna Dermicheva for The New York Times

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Victory Chukwu and her mother prepare lunch in Lagos, Nigeria.CreditAmarachi Chukwuma for The New York Times

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Jung Eun Yang applies pigment to a mannequin. Her dream is to become a makeup artist.CreditDa Hyeon Kim for The New York Times

Sarah Sunday Moses, 19, hails from South Sudan but grew up in Kenya after her parents fled the instability in their country. She photographed Wanjiku Muthoni Gakuru, who is studying urban planning at the University of Nairobi. What impressed Ms. Moses “the most in doing the project was the amount of people that were required,” she said, and the complexity of the forms that we asked the photographers to fill out.

She hopes that readers see that “despite being from different parts of the world, we are still similar,” she said.

Some of the photographers documented young women who were similar to themselves, while others spent time in situations quite different from their own. Tahia Farhin Haque from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is studying biochemistry at North South University while also studying at a photography school. While she describes herself as a practicing Muslim who wears a hijab, she photographed Shama Ghosha, a young Hindu woman who lives with her husband in Chandpur and hopes to finish high school and become a teacher.

“I went there with my eyes shut and came back with my eyes open of an entirely different life of a girl that lived in a different state,” she said. “We must empathize with the world around us. And not take anything for granted.”

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Anndrine Lund and friends pack up their things during a rainstorm in Norway.CreditCelina Christoffersen for The New York Times

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Shenzhi Xu at her high school in Chengdu, China.CreditLuxi Yang for The New York Times

Help Us Celebrate Girlhood Around the World

Share a photo of yourself at 18 with the hashtag #ThisIs18 on your favorite social platform. What advice would you give to the girl in the photo? Follow along on Instagram (@nytgender) as we feature some of our favorite TBTs.

James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. @JamesEstrin

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Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls, in 2018-10-11 13:03:37

[fairytaletold]

@striigon // again, literally did not ask, i'm so sorry,

Romanian winters are cold and gray. They are close enough, here, to the Black Sea that fog often rolls in at night; it enshrouds the town right now, obscuring the view. Hiding them. The house had once been filled with light and laughter: now it has begun the slow decline into ruin, with flaking paint and hinges that have begun to rust.

A soft breeze blows through the cool, still night. It is warm. Caresses his cheek, a phantom touch. There is no shift within the home, no sound past the way the house seems to breathe, but it hangs in the air anyway. A voice, like wind whispering through trees, like the soft fall of leaves to the ground.

You found him.

[algarithmblognumber]

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls http://www.nature-business.com/nature-meet-the-young-female-photographers-who-documented-18-year-old-girls/

Nature

LENS

The New York Times asked 22 young women to take photos for a project exploring daily life for girls around the world who are becoming adults this year.

Image

Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale, Miss., visiting where she grew up.CreditCreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

TiKa Wallace is not your typical New York Times photographer.

She’s 17, competes in slam poetry events and describes herself as “an amalgamation of creative witticisms, music references and chocolate.” Raised by a single parent from a blue-collar background, this “young, queer, black girl” attends high school in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.

She is, as she puts it, “a square peg in a round hole.”

She is also among 22 young women who took photos for the project “This is 18,” which documents girls around the world. And now she has been published in The New York Times, in a special section devoted to exploring what life looks like for girls turning 18 in 2018. The project goes online today and will appear in print next week.

“What surprised me is that a major news outlet that is consumed by millions of people all over the world is allowing teenagers to tell teenager stories,” she said. “Normally, when a story is told, especially for a major news outlet, it’s told by someone who’s 30 or 40 years old. It’s just seen from a different lens versus when your peers get to tell your story.”

Staff photographers for The New York Times usually have several years of professional experience at other news organizations, and even then, they usually have to wait awhile before they get to work on projects. But the visual journalists like Ms. Wallace whom we enlisted for this project were decidedly different. They were young women, mostly teenagers.

Image

Mahak Naiwal with her friends at her home in New Delhi.CreditShraddha Gupta for The New York Times

Image

Liana Sharifian, among few Iranian women who play the bagpipe (ney-anbān), and her friend Miad play folk music from southern Iran.CreditAtefe Moeini for The New York Times

Image

Maryclare Chinedo and her mother in the Bronx before departing for Brown University.CreditJulie Lozano/Bronx Documentary Center

Jessica Bennett, the paper’s gender editor, realized early on that the key to success for this project was going to be getting an authentic view of the lives of 18-year-old girls. She and Jodi Rudoren, associate managing editor for audience — in collaboration with a team of editors and designers in Styles — decided the best way to assure that authenticity of experience was to have teenage photographers take the pictures and conduct interviews.

The project, managed by Sharon Attia, a 23-year-old photographer herself, became less hierarchal because most of the young women also choose their subjects.

The team behind the project paired each photographer with a mentor to help them complete the assignment and to make it a learning experience.

We asked the photographers to find the girls, photograph and interview them, and make videos of their subjects, as well. Although the photographers were mostly in their late teens, they were asked to act like professionals. And they did.

So how do you find a couple dozen talented female teenage photographers from all over the world? Well, let’s say it takes a village — a global village. Sandra Stevenson, the project’s picture editor, and I relied on a global network of photographers, editors and teachers that we have compiled over decades.

Image

Lori’anne Bemba, center, with her sister and grandmother at a family wedding in Montreal, Canada.CreditAdele Foglia for The New York Times

Image

Sage Grace Dolan-Sandrino at Bard College in New York.CreditTiKa Wallace for The New York Times

Image

Obdulia González González embroiders beside her artesanal craft stall in Zacatecas, Mexico.CreditJesse Mireles for The New York Times

The team decided not to take a set approach, but it did try to choose 18-year-old female subjects with various experiences from a variety of places. For the most part, it was an organic process, because it was led by the young women. And it was often an educational experience for the photographers, as Adèle Foglia, a 21-year-old photographer from Montreal, noted.

“What surprised me the most about this project was to realize how differently the world all experiences this transition to adulthood,” she said. “And also it pushed me to reflect on my own experience and to see how sometimes the world may be such an unwelcoming space for women who have dreams and the determination to realize those dreams.”

Many of the photographers felt empowered by the project and the opportunity to highlight their own concerns in their own communities.

Jessie Mirelas, 19, who grew up in Zacatecas, Mexico, has always been proud of living in “a diverse multicultural country with great architecture, great destinations and an exquisite gastronomy — a place where the peoples that preceded us remain alive.”

She photographed Obdulia González González, an 18-year-old who is part of the indigenous Wixárika people of northern Mexico. She helps her parents sell traditional crafts and hopes to attend college.

“I believe this project is important because it’s giving us a voice, an opportunity to tell our story not only just in Mexico, but to the world,” said Ms. Mirelas, who studies at the University of Veracruz and wants to become a journalist. “To be able to show the legacy and cultural heritage of our indigenous peoples who are often neglected or ignored.”

Image

Madison changes her son’s diaper.CreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

Image

Yasmine Malone photographing Madison as she looks through her journals and art.CreditChandler Griffin

Yasmine Malone, who turned 20 this month, grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta and is now a student at the University Of Mississippi in Oxford, majoring in English and political science. Using just the camera in her phone, she documented Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale.

“I saw much of my mom and sister in her when she spoke about these things, being that they have all experienced being a teen mom in poverty with limited resources,” she said. “The frequency of this story is where it’s power stems. Madison Justice is not alone in her struggle; plenty of teens deal with it. Their stories deserve to be told for not only the realness of it all, but for its humanity, perseverance and strength.”

When many think of the Delta, they think of “poverty, crime, gun violence and low health rates,” Ms. Malone said. She learned that “we all have a story worth telling” which, over time fosters hope in her community. “If we can find our common threads,” she said, “we’ll realize the gaps between us are not that big, and there is where real social change can happen.”

Image

Millie Landewee, a member of an all-girl skate crew in Melbourne, in her bedroom.CreditEremaya Albrecht for The New York Times

Image

Shama Ghosh with her sister-in-law’s baby.CreditTahia Farhin Haque for The New York Times.

Image

Wanjiku Gakuru in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi.CreditSarah Sunday Moses for The New York Times

Some of the young photographers already had a mentor, but for the others, we asked photographers in their country to take on the role. Sandra provided guidance on how to take photographs and monitored the progress of participants to keep them on track. For three months straight, she was like an air traffic controller on the day before Thanksgiving — with some of the pilots speaking languages she did not understand.

For many participants, the project was a crash course in documentary photography and filmmaking: Make wide shots so we can see where you are, and also details. Photograph them hanging out with both friends and family and in their rooms alone. And be sure to collect family photos. Oh, and make a video of them, too.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Attia teamed up with editors from the Styles section and digital and print designers to curate all the material and present it as a zine.

At the beginning, each photographer was asked to find three different 18 year olds. We asked them to not choose their friends and to send us a brief bio of each subject and a few photos of them in their rooms. The team then chose one of those subjects for each photographer.

Image

Aleksandra Yuryeva with her younger sister and friend at a park in Moscow.CreditAnna Dermicheva for The New York Times

Image

Victory Chukwu and her mother prepare lunch in Lagos, Nigeria.CreditAmarachi Chukwuma for The New York Times

Image

Jung Eun Yang applies pigment to a mannequin. Her dream is to become a makeup artist.CreditDa Hyeon Kim for The New York Times

Sarah Sunday Moses, 19, hails from South Sudan but grew up in Kenya after her parents fled the instability in their country. She photographed Wanjiku Muthoni Gakuru, who is studying urban planning at the University of Nairobi. What impressed Ms. Moses “the most in doing the project was the amount of people that were required,” she said, and the complexity of the forms that we asked the photographers to fill out.

She hopes that readers see that “despite being from different parts of the world, we are still similar,” she said.

Some of the photographers documented young women who were similar to themselves, while others spent time in situations quite different from their own. Tahia Farhin Haque from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is studying biochemistry at North South University while also studying at a photography school. While she describes herself as a practicing Muslim who wears a hijab, she photographed Shama Ghosha, a young Hindu woman who lives with her husband in Chandpur and hopes to finish high school and become a teacher.

“I went there with my eyes shut and came back with my eyes open of an entirely different life of a girl that lived in a different state,” she said. “We must empathize with the world around us. And not take anything for granted.”

Image

Anndrine Lund and friends pack up their things during a rainstorm in Norway.CreditCelina Christoffersen for The New York Times

Image

Shenzhi Xu at her high school in Chengdu, China.CreditLuxi Yang for The New York Times

Help Us Celebrate Girlhood Around the World

Share a photo of yourself at 18 with the hashtag #ThisIs18 on your favorite social platform. What advice would you give to the girl in the photo? Follow along on Instagram (@nytgender) as we feature some of our favorite TBTs.

James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. @JamesEstrin

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/lens/what-life-looks-like-girls-18.html |

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls, in 2018-10-11 13:03:37

[blogwonderwebsites]

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls http://www.nature-business.com/nature-meet-the-young-female-photographers-who-documented-18-year-old-girls/

Nature

LENS

The New York Times asked 22 young women to take photos for a project exploring daily life for girls around the world who are becoming adults this year.

Image

Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale, Miss., visiting where she grew up.CreditCreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

TiKa Wallace is not your typical New York Times photographer.

She’s 17, competes in slam poetry events and describes herself as “an amalgamation of creative witticisms, music references and chocolate.” Raised by a single parent from a blue-collar background, this “young, queer, black girl” attends high school in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.

She is, as she puts it, “a square peg in a round hole.”

She is also among 22 young women who took photos for the project “This is 18,” which documents girls around the world. And now she has been published in The New York Times, in a special section devoted to exploring what life looks like for girls turning 18 in 2018. The project goes online today and will appear in print next week.

“What surprised me is that a major news outlet that is consumed by millions of people all over the world is allowing teenagers to tell teenager stories,” she said. “Normally, when a story is told, especially for a major news outlet, it’s told by someone who’s 30 or 40 years old. It’s just seen from a different lens versus when your peers get to tell your story.”

Staff photographers for The New York Times usually have several years of professional experience at other news organizations, and even then, they usually have to wait awhile before they get to work on projects. But the visual journalists like Ms. Wallace whom we enlisted for this project were decidedly different. They were young women, mostly teenagers.

Image

Mahak Naiwal with her friends at her home in New Delhi.CreditShraddha Gupta for The New York Times

Image

Liana Sharifian, among few Iranian women who play the bagpipe (ney-anbān), and her friend Miad play folk music from southern Iran.CreditAtefe Moeini for The New York Times

Image

Maryclare Chinedo and her mother in the Bronx before departing for Brown University.CreditJulie Lozano/Bronx Documentary Center

Jessica Bennett, the paper’s gender editor, realized early on that the key to success for this project was going to be getting an authentic view of the lives of 18-year-old girls. She and Jodi Rudoren, associate managing editor for audience — in collaboration with a team of editors and designers in Styles — decided the best way to assure that authenticity of experience was to have teenage photographers take the pictures and conduct interviews.

The project, managed by Sharon Attia, a 23-year-old photographer herself, became less hierarchal because most of the young women also choose their subjects.

The team behind the project paired each photographer with a mentor to help them complete the assignment and to make it a learning experience.

We asked the photographers to find the girls, photograph and interview them, and make videos of their subjects, as well. Although the photographers were mostly in their late teens, they were asked to act like professionals. And they did.

So how do you find a couple dozen talented female teenage photographers from all over the world? Well, let’s say it takes a village — a global village. Sandra Stevenson, the project’s picture editor, and I relied on a global network of photographers, editors and teachers that we have compiled over decades.

Image

Lori’anne Bemba, center, with her sister and grandmother at a family wedding in Montreal, Canada.CreditAdele Foglia for The New York Times

Image

Sage Grace Dolan-Sandrino at Bard College in New York.CreditTiKa Wallace for The New York Times

Image

Obdulia González González embroiders beside her artesanal craft stall in Zacatecas, Mexico.CreditJesse Mireles for The New York Times

The team decided not to take a set approach, but it did try to choose 18-year-old female subjects with various experiences from a variety of places. For the most part, it was an organic process, because it was led by the young women. And it was often an educational experience for the photographers, as Adèle Foglia, a 21-year-old photographer from Montreal, noted.

“What surprised me the most about this project was to realize how differently the world all experiences this transition to adulthood,” she said. “And also it pushed me to reflect on my own experience and to see how sometimes the world may be such an unwelcoming space for women who have dreams and the determination to realize those dreams.”

Many of the photographers felt empowered by the project and the opportunity to highlight their own concerns in their own communities.

Jessie Mirelas, 19, who grew up in Zacatecas, Mexico, has always been proud of living in “a diverse multicultural country with great architecture, great destinations and an exquisite gastronomy — a place where the peoples that preceded us remain alive.”

She photographed Obdulia González González, an 18-year-old who is part of the indigenous Wixárika people of northern Mexico. She helps her parents sell traditional crafts and hopes to attend college.

“I believe this project is important because it’s giving us a voice, an opportunity to tell our story not only just in Mexico, but to the world,” said Ms. Mirelas, who studies at the University of Veracruz and wants to become a journalist. “To be able to show the legacy and cultural heritage of our indigenous peoples who are often neglected or ignored.”

Image

Madison changes her son’s diaper.CreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

Image

Yasmine Malone photographing Madison as she looks through her journals and art.CreditChandler Griffin

Yasmine Malone, who turned 20 this month, grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta and is now a student at the University Of Mississippi in Oxford, majoring in English and political science. Using just the camera in her phone, she documented Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale.

“I saw much of my mom and sister in her when she spoke about these things, being that they have all experienced being a teen mom in poverty with limited resources,” she said. “The frequency of this story is where it’s power stems. Madison Justice is not alone in her struggle; plenty of teens deal with it. Their stories deserve to be told for not only the realness of it all, but for its humanity, perseverance and strength.”

When many think of the Delta, they think of “poverty, crime, gun violence and low health rates,” Ms. Malone said. She learned that “we all have a story worth telling” which, over time fosters hope in her community. “If we can find our common threads,” she said, “we’ll realize the gaps between us are not that big, and there is where real social change can happen.”

Image

Millie Landewee, a member of an all-girl skate crew in Melbourne, in her bedroom.CreditEremaya Albrecht for The New York Times

Image

Shama Ghosh with her sister-in-law’s baby.CreditTahia Farhin Haque for The New York Times.

Image

Wanjiku Gakuru in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi.CreditSarah Sunday Moses for The New York Times

Some of the young photographers already had a mentor, but for the others, we asked photographers in their country to take on the role. Sandra provided guidance on how to take photographs and monitored the progress of participants to keep them on track. For three months straight, she was like an air traffic controller on the day before Thanksgiving — with some of the pilots speaking languages she did not understand.

For many participants, the project was a crash course in documentary photography and filmmaking: Make wide shots so we can see where you are, and also details. Photograph them hanging out with both friends and family and in their rooms alone. And be sure to collect family photos. Oh, and make a video of them, too.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Attia teamed up with editors from the Styles section and digital and print designers to curate all the material and present it as a zine.

At the beginning, each photographer was asked to find three different 18 year olds. We asked them to not choose their friends and to send us a brief bio of each subject and a few photos of them in their rooms. The team then chose one of those subjects for each photographer.

Image

Aleksandra Yuryeva with her younger sister and friend at a park in Moscow.CreditAnna Dermicheva for The New York Times

Image

Victory Chukwu and her mother prepare lunch in Lagos, Nigeria.CreditAmarachi Chukwuma for The New York Times

Image

Jung Eun Yang applies pigment to a mannequin. Her dream is to become a makeup artist.CreditDa Hyeon Kim for The New York Times

Sarah Sunday Moses, 19, hails from South Sudan but grew up in Kenya after her parents fled the instability in their country. She photographed Wanjiku Muthoni Gakuru, who is studying urban planning at the University of Nairobi. What impressed Ms. Moses “the most in doing the project was the amount of people that were required,” she said, and the complexity of the forms that we asked the photographers to fill out.

She hopes that readers see that “despite being from different parts of the world, we are still similar,” she said.

Some of the photographers documented young women who were similar to themselves, while others spent time in situations quite different from their own. Tahia Farhin Haque from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is studying biochemistry at North South University while also studying at a photography school. While she describes herself as a practicing Muslim who wears a hijab, she photographed Shama Ghosha, a young Hindu woman who lives with her husband in Chandpur and hopes to finish high school and become a teacher.

“I went there with my eyes shut and came back with my eyes open of an entirely different life of a girl that lived in a different state,” she said. “We must empathize with the world around us. And not take anything for granted.”

Image

Anndrine Lund and friends pack up their things during a rainstorm in Norway.CreditCelina Christoffersen for The New York Times

Image

Shenzhi Xu at her high school in Chengdu, China.CreditLuxi Yang for The New York Times

Help Us Celebrate Girlhood Around the World

Share a photo of yourself at 18 with the hashtag #ThisIs18 on your favorite social platform. What advice would you give to the girl in the photo? Follow along on Instagram (@nytgender) as we feature some of our favorite TBTs.

James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. @JamesEstrin

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/lens/what-life-looks-like-girls-18.html |

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls, in 2018-10-11 13:03:37

[blogparadiseisland]

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls http://www.nature-business.com/nature-meet-the-young-female-photographers-who-documented-18-year-old-girls/

Nature

LENS

The New York Times asked 22 young women to take photos for a project exploring daily life for girls around the world who are becoming adults this year.

Image

Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale, Miss., visiting where she grew up.CreditCreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

TiKa Wallace is not your typical New York Times photographer.

She’s 17, competes in slam poetry events and describes herself as “an amalgamation of creative witticisms, music references and chocolate.” Raised by a single parent from a blue-collar background, this “young, queer, black girl” attends high school in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.

She is, as she puts it, “a square peg in a round hole.”

She is also among 22 young women who took photos for the project “This is 18,” which documents girls around the world. And now she has been published in The New York Times, in a special section devoted to exploring what life looks like for girls turning 18 in 2018. The project goes online today and will appear in print next week.

“What surprised me is that a major news outlet that is consumed by millions of people all over the world is allowing teenagers to tell teenager stories,” she said. “Normally, when a story is told, especially for a major news outlet, it’s told by someone who’s 30 or 40 years old. It’s just seen from a different lens versus when your peers get to tell your story.”

Staff photographers for The New York Times usually have several years of professional experience at other news organizations, and even then, they usually have to wait awhile before they get to work on projects. But the visual journalists like Ms. Wallace whom we enlisted for this project were decidedly different. They were young women, mostly teenagers.

Image

Mahak Naiwal with her friends at her home in New Delhi.CreditShraddha Gupta for The New York Times

Image

Liana Sharifian, among few Iranian women who play the bagpipe (ney-anbān), and her friend Miad play folk music from southern Iran.CreditAtefe Moeini for The New York Times

Image

Maryclare Chinedo and her mother in the Bronx before departing for Brown University.CreditJulie Lozano/Bronx Documentary Center

Jessica Bennett, the paper’s gender editor, realized early on that the key to success for this project was going to be getting an authentic view of the lives of 18-year-old girls. She and Jodi Rudoren, associate managing editor for audience — in collaboration with a team of editors and designers in Styles — decided the best way to assure that authenticity of experience was to have teenage photographers take the pictures and conduct interviews.

The project, managed by Sharon Attia, a 23-year-old photographer herself, became less hierarchal because most of the young women also choose their subjects.

The team behind the project paired each photographer with a mentor to help them complete the assignment and to make it a learning experience.

We asked the photographers to find the girls, photograph and interview them, and make videos of their subjects, as well. Although the photographers were mostly in their late teens, they were asked to act like professionals. And they did.

So how do you find a couple dozen talented female teenage photographers from all over the world? Well, let’s say it takes a village — a global village. Sandra Stevenson, the project’s picture editor, and I relied on a global network of photographers, editors and teachers that we have compiled over decades.

Image

Lori’anne Bemba, center, with her sister and grandmother at a family wedding in Montreal, Canada.CreditAdele Foglia for The New York Times

Image

Sage Grace Dolan-Sandrino at Bard College in New York.CreditTiKa Wallace for The New York Times

Image

Obdulia González González embroiders beside her artesanal craft stall in Zacatecas, Mexico.CreditJesse Mireles for The New York Times

The team decided not to take a set approach, but it did try to choose 18-year-old female subjects with various experiences from a variety of places. For the most part, it was an organic process, because it was led by the young women. And it was often an educational experience for the photographers, as Adèle Foglia, a 21-year-old photographer from Montreal, noted.

“What surprised me the most about this project was to realize how differently the world all experiences this transition to adulthood,” she said. “And also it pushed me to reflect on my own experience and to see how sometimes the world may be such an unwelcoming space for women who have dreams and the determination to realize those dreams.”

Many of the photographers felt empowered by the project and the opportunity to highlight their own concerns in their own communities.

Jessie Mirelas, 19, who grew up in Zacatecas, Mexico, has always been proud of living in “a diverse multicultural country with great architecture, great destinations and an exquisite gastronomy — a place where the peoples that preceded us remain alive.”

She photographed Obdulia González González, an 18-year-old who is part of the indigenous Wixárika people of northern Mexico. She helps her parents sell traditional crafts and hopes to attend college.

“I believe this project is important because it’s giving us a voice, an opportunity to tell our story not only just in Mexico, but to the world,” said Ms. Mirelas, who studies at the University of Veracruz and wants to become a journalist. “To be able to show the legacy and cultural heritage of our indigenous peoples who are often neglected or ignored.”

Image

Madison changes her son’s diaper.CreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

Image

Yasmine Malone photographing Madison as she looks through her journals and art.CreditChandler Griffin

Yasmine Malone, who turned 20 this month, grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta and is now a student at the University Of Mississippi in Oxford, majoring in English and political science. Using just the camera in her phone, she documented Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale.

“I saw much of my mom and sister in her when she spoke about these things, being that they have all experienced being a teen mom in poverty with limited resources,” she said. “The frequency of this story is where it’s power stems. Madison Justice is not alone in her struggle; plenty of teens deal with it. Their stories deserve to be told for not only the realness of it all, but for its humanity, perseverance and strength.”

When many think of the Delta, they think of “poverty, crime, gun violence and low health rates,” Ms. Malone said. She learned that “we all have a story worth telling” which, over time fosters hope in her community. “If we can find our common threads,” she said, “we’ll realize the gaps between us are not that big, and there is where real social change can happen.”

Image

Millie Landewee, a member of an all-girl skate crew in Melbourne, in her bedroom.CreditEremaya Albrecht for The New York Times

Image

Shama Ghosh with her sister-in-law’s baby.CreditTahia Farhin Haque for The New York Times.

Image

Wanjiku Gakuru in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi.CreditSarah Sunday Moses for The New York Times

Some of the young photographers already had a mentor, but for the others, we asked photographers in their country to take on the role. Sandra provided guidance on how to take photographs and monitored the progress of participants to keep them on track. For three months straight, she was like an air traffic controller on the day before Thanksgiving — with some of the pilots speaking languages she did not understand.

For many participants, the project was a crash course in documentary photography and filmmaking: Make wide shots so we can see where you are, and also details. Photograph them hanging out with both friends and family and in their rooms alone. And be sure to collect family photos. Oh, and make a video of them, too.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Attia teamed up with editors from the Styles section and digital and print designers to curate all the material and present it as a zine.

At the beginning, each photographer was asked to find three different 18 year olds. We asked them to not choose their friends and to send us a brief bio of each subject and a few photos of them in their rooms. The team then chose one of those subjects for each photographer.

Image

Aleksandra Yuryeva with her younger sister and friend at a park in Moscow.CreditAnna Dermicheva for The New York Times

Image

Victory Chukwu and her mother prepare lunch in Lagos, Nigeria.CreditAmarachi Chukwuma for The New York Times

Image

Jung Eun Yang applies pigment to a mannequin. Her dream is to become a makeup artist.CreditDa Hyeon Kim for The New York Times

Sarah Sunday Moses, 19, hails from South Sudan but grew up in Kenya after her parents fled the instability in their country. She photographed Wanjiku Muthoni Gakuru, who is studying urban planning at the University of Nairobi. What impressed Ms. Moses “the most in doing the project was the amount of people that were required,” she said, and the complexity of the forms that we asked the photographers to fill out.

She hopes that readers see that “despite being from different parts of the world, we are still similar,” she said.

Some of the photographers documented young women who were similar to themselves, while others spent time in situations quite different from their own. Tahia Farhin Haque from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is studying biochemistry at North South University while also studying at a photography school. While she describes herself as a practicing Muslim who wears a hijab, she photographed Shama Ghosha, a young Hindu woman who lives with her husband in Chandpur and hopes to finish high school and become a teacher.

“I went there with my eyes shut and came back with my eyes open of an entirely different life of a girl that lived in a different state,” she said. “We must empathize with the world around us. And not take anything for granted.”

Image

Anndrine Lund and friends pack up their things during a rainstorm in Norway.CreditCelina Christoffersen for The New York Times

Image

Shenzhi Xu at her high school in Chengdu, China.CreditLuxi Yang for The New York Times

Help Us Celebrate Girlhood Around the World

Share a photo of yourself at 18 with the hashtag #ThisIs18 on your favorite social platform. What advice would you give to the girl in the photo? Follow along on Instagram (@nytgender) as we feature some of our favorite TBTs.

James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. @JamesEstrin

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/lens/what-life-looks-like-girls-18.html |

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls, in 2018-10-11 13:03:37

[computacionalblog]

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls http://www.nature-business.com/nature-meet-the-young-female-photographers-who-documented-18-year-old-girls/

Nature

LENS

The New York Times asked 22 young women to take photos for a project exploring daily life for girls around the world who are becoming adults this year.

Image

Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale, Miss., visiting where she grew up.CreditCreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

TiKa Wallace is not your typical New York Times photographer.

She’s 17, competes in slam poetry events and describes herself as “an amalgamation of creative witticisms, music references and chocolate.” Raised by a single parent from a blue-collar background, this “young, queer, black girl” attends high school in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.

She is, as she puts it, “a square peg in a round hole.”

She is also among 22 young women who took photos for the project “This is 18,” which documents girls around the world. And now she has been published in The New York Times, in a special section devoted to exploring what life looks like for girls turning 18 in 2018. The project goes online today and will appear in print next week.

“What surprised me is that a major news outlet that is consumed by millions of people all over the world is allowing teenagers to tell teenager stories,” she said. “Normally, when a story is told, especially for a major news outlet, it’s told by someone who’s 30 or 40 years old. It’s just seen from a different lens versus when your peers get to tell your story.”

Staff photographers for The New York Times usually have several years of professional experience at other news organizations, and even then, they usually have to wait awhile before they get to work on projects. But the visual journalists like Ms. Wallace whom we enlisted for this project were decidedly different. They were young women, mostly teenagers.

Image

Mahak Naiwal with her friends at her home in New Delhi.CreditShraddha Gupta for The New York Times

Image

Liana Sharifian, among few Iranian women who play the bagpipe (ney-anbān), and her friend Miad play folk music from southern Iran.CreditAtefe Moeini for The New York Times

Image

Maryclare Chinedo and her mother in the Bronx before departing for Brown University.CreditJulie Lozano/Bronx Documentary Center

Jessica Bennett, the paper’s gender editor, realized early on that the key to success for this project was going to be getting an authentic view of the lives of 18-year-old girls. She and Jodi Rudoren, associate managing editor for audience — in collaboration with a team of editors and designers in Styles — decided the best way to assure that authenticity of experience was to have teenage photographers take the pictures and conduct interviews.

The project, managed by Sharon Attia, a 23-year-old photographer herself, became less hierarchal because most of the young women also choose their subjects.

The team behind the project paired each photographer with a mentor to help them complete the assignment and to make it a learning experience.

We asked the photographers to find the girls, photograph and interview them, and make videos of their subjects, as well. Although the photographers were mostly in their late teens, they were asked to act like professionals. And they did.

So how do you find a couple dozen talented female teenage photographers from all over the world? Well, let’s say it takes a village — a global village. Sandra Stevenson, the project’s picture editor, and I relied on a global network of photographers, editors and teachers that we have compiled over decades.

Image

Lori’anne Bemba, center, with her sister and grandmother at a family wedding in Montreal, Canada.CreditAdele Foglia for The New York Times

Image

Sage Grace Dolan-Sandrino at Bard College in New York.CreditTiKa Wallace for The New York Times

Image

Obdulia González González embroiders beside her artesanal craft stall in Zacatecas, Mexico.CreditJesse Mireles for The New York Times

The team decided not to take a set approach, but it did try to choose 18-year-old female subjects with various experiences from a variety of places. For the most part, it was an organic process, because it was led by the young women. And it was often an educational experience for the photographers, as Adèle Foglia, a 21-year-old photographer from Montreal, noted.

“What surprised me the most about this project was to realize how differently the world all experiences this transition to adulthood,” she said. “And also it pushed me to reflect on my own experience and to see how sometimes the world may be such an unwelcoming space for women who have dreams and the determination to realize those dreams.”

Many of the photographers felt empowered by the project and the opportunity to highlight their own concerns in their own communities.

Jessie Mirelas, 19, who grew up in Zacatecas, Mexico, has always been proud of living in “a diverse multicultural country with great architecture, great destinations and an exquisite gastronomy — a place where the peoples that preceded us remain alive.”

She photographed Obdulia González González, an 18-year-old who is part of the indigenous Wixárika people of northern Mexico. She helps her parents sell traditional crafts and hopes to attend college.

“I believe this project is important because it’s giving us a voice, an opportunity to tell our story not only just in Mexico, but to the world,” said Ms. Mirelas, who studies at the University of Veracruz and wants to become a journalist. “To be able to show the legacy and cultural heritage of our indigenous peoples who are often neglected or ignored.”

Image

Madison changes her son’s diaper.CreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

Image

Yasmine Malone photographing Madison as she looks through her journals and art.CreditChandler Griffin

Yasmine Malone, who turned 20 this month, grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta and is now a student at the University Of Mississippi in Oxford, majoring in English and political science. Using just the camera in her phone, she documented Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale.

“I saw much of my mom and sister in her when she spoke about these things, being that they have all experienced being a teen mom in poverty with limited resources,” she said. “The frequency of this story is where it’s power stems. Madison Justice is not alone in her struggle; plenty of teens deal with it. Their stories deserve to be told for not only the realness of it all, but for its humanity, perseverance and strength.”

When many think of the Delta, they think of “poverty, crime, gun violence and low health rates,” Ms. Malone said. She learned that “we all have a story worth telling” which, over time fosters hope in her community. “If we can find our common threads,” she said, “we’ll realize the gaps between us are not that big, and there is where real social change can happen.”

Image

Millie Landewee, a member of an all-girl skate crew in Melbourne, in her bedroom.CreditEremaya Albrecht for The New York Times

Image

Shama Ghosh with her sister-in-law’s baby.CreditTahia Farhin Haque for The New York Times.

Image

Wanjiku Gakuru in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi.CreditSarah Sunday Moses for The New York Times

Some of the young photographers already had a mentor, but for the others, we asked photographers in their country to take on the role. Sandra provided guidance on how to take photographs and monitored the progress of participants to keep them on track. For three months straight, she was like an air traffic controller on the day before Thanksgiving — with some of the pilots speaking languages she did not understand.

For many participants, the project was a crash course in documentary photography and filmmaking: Make wide shots so we can see where you are, and also details. Photograph them hanging out with both friends and family and in their rooms alone. And be sure to collect family photos. Oh, and make a video of them, too.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Attia teamed up with editors from the Styles section and digital and print designers to curate all the material and present it as a zine.

At the beginning, each photographer was asked to find three different 18 year olds. We asked them to not choose their friends and to send us a brief bio of each subject and a few photos of them in their rooms. The team then chose one of those subjects for each photographer.

Image

Aleksandra Yuryeva with her younger sister and friend at a park in Moscow.CreditAnna Dermicheva for The New York Times

Image

Victory Chukwu and her mother prepare lunch in Lagos, Nigeria.CreditAmarachi Chukwuma for The New York Times

Image

Jung Eun Yang applies pigment to a mannequin. Her dream is to become a makeup artist.CreditDa Hyeon Kim for The New York Times

Sarah Sunday Moses, 19, hails from South Sudan but grew up in Kenya after her parents fled the instability in their country. She photographed Wanjiku Muthoni Gakuru, who is studying urban planning at the University of Nairobi. What impressed Ms. Moses “the most in doing the project was the amount of people that were required,” she said, and the complexity of the forms that we asked the photographers to fill out.

She hopes that readers see that “despite being from different parts of the world, we are still similar,” she said.

Some of the photographers documented young women who were similar to themselves, while others spent time in situations quite different from their own. Tahia Farhin Haque from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is studying biochemistry at North South University while also studying at a photography school. While she describes herself as a practicing Muslim who wears a hijab, she photographed Shama Ghosha, a young Hindu woman who lives with her husband in Chandpur and hopes to finish high school and become a teacher.

“I went there with my eyes shut and came back with my eyes open of an entirely different life of a girl that lived in a different state,” she said. “We must empathize with the world around us. And not take anything for granted.”

Image

Anndrine Lund and friends pack up their things during a rainstorm in Norway.CreditCelina Christoffersen for The New York Times

Image

Shenzhi Xu at her high school in Chengdu, China.CreditLuxi Yang for The New York Times

Help Us Celebrate Girlhood Around the World

Share a photo of yourself at 18 with the hashtag #ThisIs18 on your favorite social platform. What advice would you give to the girl in the photo? Follow along on Instagram (@nytgender) as we feature some of our favorite TBTs.

James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. @JamesEstrin

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/lens/what-life-looks-like-girls-18.html |

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls, in 2018-10-11 13:03:37

[internetbetterforall]

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls http://www.nature-business.com/nature-meet-the-young-female-photographers-who-documented-18-year-old-girls/

Nature

LENS

The New York Times asked 22 young women to take photos for a project exploring daily life for girls around the world who are becoming adults this year.

Image

Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale, Miss., visiting where she grew up.CreditCreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

TiKa Wallace is not your typical New York Times photographer.

She’s 17, competes in slam poetry events and describes herself as “an amalgamation of creative witticisms, music references and chocolate.” Raised by a single parent from a blue-collar background, this “young, queer, black girl” attends high school in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.

She is, as she puts it, “a square peg in a round hole.”

She is also among 22 young women who took photos for the project “This is 18,” which documents girls around the world. And now she has been published in The New York Times, in a special section devoted to exploring what life looks like for girls turning 18 in 2018. The project goes online today and will appear in print next week.

“What surprised me is that a major news outlet that is consumed by millions of people all over the world is allowing teenagers to tell teenager stories,” she said. “Normally, when a story is told, especially for a major news outlet, it’s told by someone who’s 30 or 40 years old. It’s just seen from a different lens versus when your peers get to tell your story.”

Staff photographers for The New York Times usually have several years of professional experience at other news organizations, and even then, they usually have to wait awhile before they get to work on projects. But the visual journalists like Ms. Wallace whom we enlisted for this project were decidedly different. They were young women, mostly teenagers.

Image

Mahak Naiwal with her friends at her home in New Delhi.CreditShraddha Gupta for The New York Times

Image

Liana Sharifian, among few Iranian women who play the bagpipe (ney-anbān), and her friend Miad play folk music from southern Iran.CreditAtefe Moeini for The New York Times

Image

Maryclare Chinedo and her mother in the Bronx before departing for Brown University.CreditJulie Lozano/Bronx Documentary Center

Jessica Bennett, the paper’s gender editor, realized early on that the key to success for this project was going to be getting an authentic view of the lives of 18-year-old girls. She and Jodi Rudoren, associate managing editor for audience — in collaboration with a team of editors and designers in Styles — decided the best way to assure that authenticity of experience was to have teenage photographers take the pictures and conduct interviews.

The project, managed by Sharon Attia, a 23-year-old photographer herself, became less hierarchal because most of the young women also choose their subjects.

The team behind the project paired each photographer with a mentor to help them complete the assignment and to make it a learning experience.

We asked the photographers to find the girls, photograph and interview them, and make videos of their subjects, as well. Although the photographers were mostly in their late teens, they were asked to act like professionals. And they did.

So how do you find a couple dozen talented female teenage photographers from all over the world? Well, let’s say it takes a village — a global village. Sandra Stevenson, the project’s picture editor, and I relied on a global network of photographers, editors and teachers that we have compiled over decades.

Image

Lori’anne Bemba, center, with her sister and grandmother at a family wedding in Montreal, Canada.CreditAdele Foglia for The New York Times

Image

Sage Grace Dolan-Sandrino at Bard College in New York.CreditTiKa Wallace for The New York Times

Image

Obdulia González González embroiders beside her artesanal craft stall in Zacatecas, Mexico.CreditJesse Mireles for The New York Times

The team decided not to take a set approach, but it did try to choose 18-year-old female subjects with various experiences from a variety of places. For the most part, it was an organic process, because it was led by the young women. And it was often an educational experience for the photographers, as Adèle Foglia, a 21-year-old photographer from Montreal, noted.

“What surprised me the most about this project was to realize how differently the world all experiences this transition to adulthood,” she said. “And also it pushed me to reflect on my own experience and to see how sometimes the world may be such an unwelcoming space for women who have dreams and the determination to realize those dreams.”

Many of the photographers felt empowered by the project and the opportunity to highlight their own concerns in their own communities.

Jessie Mirelas, 19, who grew up in Zacatecas, Mexico, has always been proud of living in “a diverse multicultural country with great architecture, great destinations and an exquisite gastronomy — a place where the peoples that preceded us remain alive.”

She photographed Obdulia González González, an 18-year-old who is part of the indigenous Wixárika people of northern Mexico. She helps her parents sell traditional crafts and hopes to attend college.

“I believe this project is important because it’s giving us a voice, an opportunity to tell our story not only just in Mexico, but to the world,” said Ms. Mirelas, who studies at the University of Veracruz and wants to become a journalist. “To be able to show the legacy and cultural heritage of our indigenous peoples who are often neglected or ignored.”

Image

Madison changes her son’s diaper.CreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

Image

Yasmine Malone photographing Madison as she looks through her journals and art.CreditChandler Griffin

Yasmine Malone, who turned 20 this month, grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta and is now a student at the University Of Mississippi in Oxford, majoring in English and political science. Using just the camera in her phone, she documented Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale.

“I saw much of my mom and sister in her when she spoke about these things, being that they have all experienced being a teen mom in poverty with limited resources,” she said. “The frequency of this story is where it’s power stems. Madison Justice is not alone in her struggle; plenty of teens deal with it. Their stories deserve to be told for not only the realness of it all, but for its humanity, perseverance and strength.”

When many think of the Delta, they think of “poverty, crime, gun violence and low health rates,” Ms. Malone said. She learned that “we all have a story worth telling” which, over time fosters hope in her community. “If we can find our common threads,” she said, “we’ll realize the gaps between us are not that big, and there is where real social change can happen.”

Image

Millie Landewee, a member of an all-girl skate crew in Melbourne, in her bedroom.CreditEremaya Albrecht for The New York Times

Image

Shama Ghosh with her sister-in-law’s baby.CreditTahia Farhin Haque for The New York Times.

Image

Wanjiku Gakuru in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi.CreditSarah Sunday Moses for The New York Times

Some of the young photographers already had a mentor, but for the others, we asked photographers in their country to take on the role. Sandra provided guidance on how to take photographs and monitored the progress of participants to keep them on track. For three months straight, she was like an air traffic controller on the day before Thanksgiving — with some of the pilots speaking languages she did not understand.

For many participants, the project was a crash course in documentary photography and filmmaking: Make wide shots so we can see where you are, and also details. Photograph them hanging out with both friends and family and in their rooms alone. And be sure to collect family photos. Oh, and make a video of them, too.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Attia teamed up with editors from the Styles section and digital and print designers to curate all the material and present it as a zine.

At the beginning, each photographer was asked to find three different 18 year olds. We asked them to not choose their friends and to send us a brief bio of each subject and a few photos of them in their rooms. The team then chose one of those subjects for each photographer.

Image

Aleksandra Yuryeva with her younger sister and friend at a park in Moscow.CreditAnna Dermicheva for The New York Times

Image

Victory Chukwu and her mother prepare lunch in Lagos, Nigeria.CreditAmarachi Chukwuma for The New York Times

Image

Jung Eun Yang applies pigment to a mannequin. Her dream is to become a makeup artist.CreditDa Hyeon Kim for The New York Times

Sarah Sunday Moses, 19, hails from South Sudan but grew up in Kenya after her parents fled the instability in their country. She photographed Wanjiku Muthoni Gakuru, who is studying urban planning at the University of Nairobi. What impressed Ms. Moses “the most in doing the project was the amount of people that were required,” she said, and the complexity of the forms that we asked the photographers to fill out.

She hopes that readers see that “despite being from different parts of the world, we are still similar,” she said.

Some of the photographers documented young women who were similar to themselves, while others spent time in situations quite different from their own. Tahia Farhin Haque from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is studying biochemistry at North South University while also studying at a photography school. While she describes herself as a practicing Muslim who wears a hijab, she photographed Shama Ghosha, a young Hindu woman who lives with her husband in Chandpur and hopes to finish high school and become a teacher.

“I went there with my eyes shut and came back with my eyes open of an entirely different life of a girl that lived in a different state,” she said. “We must empathize with the world around us. And not take anything for granted.”

Image

Anndrine Lund and friends pack up their things during a rainstorm in Norway.CreditCelina Christoffersen for The New York Times

Image

Shenzhi Xu at her high school in Chengdu, China.CreditLuxi Yang for The New York Times

Help Us Celebrate Girlhood Around the World

Share a photo of yourself at 18 with the hashtag #ThisIs18 on your favorite social platform. What advice would you give to the girl in the photo? Follow along on Instagram (@nytgender) as we feature some of our favorite TBTs.

James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. @JamesEstrin

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/lens/what-life-looks-like-girls-18.html |

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls, in 2018-10-11 13:03:37

[blogcompetnetall]

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls http://www.nature-business.com/nature-meet-the-young-female-photographers-who-documented-18-year-old-girls/

Nature

LENS

The New York Times asked 22 young women to take photos for a project exploring daily life for girls around the world who are becoming adults this year.

Image

Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale, Miss., visiting where she grew up.CreditCreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

TiKa Wallace is not your typical New York Times photographer.

She’s 17, competes in slam poetry events and describes herself as “an amalgamation of creative witticisms, music references and chocolate.” Raised by a single parent from a blue-collar background, this “young, queer, black girl” attends high school in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.

She is, as she puts it, “a square peg in a round hole.”

She is also among 22 young women who took photos for the project “This is 18,” which documents girls around the world. And now she has been published in The New York Times, in a special section devoted to exploring what life looks like for girls turning 18 in 2018. The project goes online today and will appear in print next week.

“What surprised me is that a major news outlet that is consumed by millions of people all over the world is allowing teenagers to tell teenager stories,” she said. “Normally, when a story is told, especially for a major news outlet, it’s told by someone who’s 30 or 40 years old. It’s just seen from a different lens versus when your peers get to tell your story.”

Staff photographers for The New York Times usually have several years of professional experience at other news organizations, and even then, they usually have to wait awhile before they get to work on projects. But the visual journalists like Ms. Wallace whom we enlisted for this project were decidedly different. They were young women, mostly teenagers.

Image

Mahak Naiwal with her friends at her home in New Delhi.CreditShraddha Gupta for The New York Times

Image

Liana Sharifian, among few Iranian women who play the bagpipe (ney-anbān), and her friend Miad play folk music from southern Iran.CreditAtefe Moeini for The New York Times

Image

Maryclare Chinedo and her mother in the Bronx before departing for Brown University.CreditJulie Lozano/Bronx Documentary Center

Jessica Bennett, the paper’s gender editor, realized early on that the key to success for this project was going to be getting an authentic view of the lives of 18-year-old girls. She and Jodi Rudoren, associate managing editor for audience — in collaboration with a team of editors and designers in Styles — decided the best way to assure that authenticity of experience was to have teenage photographers take the pictures and conduct interviews.

The project, managed by Sharon Attia, a 23-year-old photographer herself, became less hierarchal because most of the young women also choose their subjects.

The team behind the project paired each photographer with a mentor to help them complete the assignment and to make it a learning experience.

We asked the photographers to find the girls, photograph and interview them, and make videos of their subjects, as well. Although the photographers were mostly in their late teens, they were asked to act like professionals. And they did.

So how do you find a couple dozen talented female teenage photographers from all over the world? Well, let’s say it takes a village — a global village. Sandra Stevenson, the project’s picture editor, and I relied on a global network of photographers, editors and teachers that we have compiled over decades.

Image

Lori’anne Bemba, center, with her sister and grandmother at a family wedding in Montreal, Canada.CreditAdele Foglia for The New York Times

Image

Sage Grace Dolan-Sandrino at Bard College in New York.CreditTiKa Wallace for The New York Times

Image

Obdulia González González embroiders beside her artesanal craft stall in Zacatecas, Mexico.CreditJesse Mireles for The New York Times

The team decided not to take a set approach, but it did try to choose 18-year-old female subjects with various experiences from a variety of places. For the most part, it was an organic process, because it was led by the young women. And it was often an educational experience for the photographers, as Adèle Foglia, a 21-year-old photographer from Montreal, noted.

“What surprised me the most about this project was to realize how differently the world all experiences this transition to adulthood,” she said. “And also it pushed me to reflect on my own experience and to see how sometimes the world may be such an unwelcoming space for women who have dreams and the determination to realize those dreams.”

Many of the photographers felt empowered by the project and the opportunity to highlight their own concerns in their own communities.

Jessie Mirelas, 19, who grew up in Zacatecas, Mexico, has always been proud of living in “a diverse multicultural country with great architecture, great destinations and an exquisite gastronomy — a place where the peoples that preceded us remain alive.”

She photographed Obdulia González González, an 18-year-old who is part of the indigenous Wixárika people of northern Mexico. She helps her parents sell traditional crafts and hopes to attend college.

“I believe this project is important because it’s giving us a voice, an opportunity to tell our story not only just in Mexico, but to the world,” said Ms. Mirelas, who studies at the University of Veracruz and wants to become a journalist. “To be able to show the legacy and cultural heritage of our indigenous peoples who are often neglected or ignored.”

Image

Madison changes her son’s diaper.CreditYasmine Malone for The New York Times

Image

Yasmine Malone photographing Madison as she looks through her journals and art.CreditChandler Griffin

Yasmine Malone, who turned 20 this month, grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta and is now a student at the University Of Mississippi in Oxford, majoring in English and political science. Using just the camera in her phone, she documented Madison Justice, a teenage mother in Clarksdale.

“I saw much of my mom and sister in her when she spoke about these things, being that they have all experienced being a teen mom in poverty with limited resources,” she said. “The frequency of this story is where it’s power stems. Madison Justice is not alone in her struggle; plenty of teens deal with it. Their stories deserve to be told for not only the realness of it all, but for its humanity, perseverance and strength.”

When many think of the Delta, they think of “poverty, crime, gun violence and low health rates,” Ms. Malone said. She learned that “we all have a story worth telling” which, over time fosters hope in her community. “If we can find our common threads,” she said, “we’ll realize the gaps between us are not that big, and there is where real social change can happen.”

Image

Millie Landewee, a member of an all-girl skate crew in Melbourne, in her bedroom.CreditEremaya Albrecht for The New York Times

Image

Shama Ghosh with her sister-in-law’s baby.CreditTahia Farhin Haque for The New York Times.

Image

Wanjiku Gakuru in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi.CreditSarah Sunday Moses for The New York Times

Some of the young photographers already had a mentor, but for the others, we asked photographers in their country to take on the role. Sandra provided guidance on how to take photographs and monitored the progress of participants to keep them on track. For three months straight, she was like an air traffic controller on the day before Thanksgiving — with some of the pilots speaking languages she did not understand.

For many participants, the project was a crash course in documentary photography and filmmaking: Make wide shots so we can see where you are, and also details. Photograph them hanging out with both friends and family and in their rooms alone. And be sure to collect family photos. Oh, and make a video of them, too.

Ms. Bennett and Ms. Attia teamed up with editors from the Styles section and digital and print designers to curate all the material and present it as a zine.

At the beginning, each photographer was asked to find three different 18 year olds. We asked them to not choose their friends and to send us a brief bio of each subject and a few photos of them in their rooms. The team then chose one of those subjects for each photographer.

Image

Aleksandra Yuryeva with her younger sister and friend at a park in Moscow.CreditAnna Dermicheva for The New York Times

Image

Victory Chukwu and her mother prepare lunch in Lagos, Nigeria.CreditAmarachi Chukwuma for The New York Times

Image

Jung Eun Yang applies pigment to a mannequin. Her dream is to become a makeup artist.CreditDa Hyeon Kim for The New York Times

Sarah Sunday Moses, 19, hails from South Sudan but grew up in Kenya after her parents fled the instability in their country. She photographed Wanjiku Muthoni Gakuru, who is studying urban planning at the University of Nairobi. What impressed Ms. Moses “the most in doing the project was the amount of people that were required,” she said, and the complexity of the forms that we asked the photographers to fill out.

She hopes that readers see that “despite being from different parts of the world, we are still similar,” she said.

Some of the photographers documented young women who were similar to themselves, while others spent time in situations quite different from their own. Tahia Farhin Haque from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is studying biochemistry at North South University while also studying at a photography school. While she describes herself as a practicing Muslim who wears a hijab, she photographed Shama Ghosha, a young Hindu woman who lives with her husband in Chandpur and hopes to finish high school and become a teacher.

“I went there with my eyes shut and came back with my eyes open of an entirely different life of a girl that lived in a different state,” she said. “We must empathize with the world around us. And not take anything for granted.”

Image

Anndrine Lund and friends pack up their things during a rainstorm in Norway.CreditCelina Christoffersen for The New York Times

Image

Shenzhi Xu at her high school in Chengdu, China.CreditLuxi Yang for The New York Times

Help Us Celebrate Girlhood Around the World

Share a photo of yourself at 18 with the hashtag #ThisIs18 on your favorite social platform. What advice would you give to the girl in the photo? Follow along on Instagram (@nytgender) as we feature some of our favorite TBTs.

James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. @JamesEstrin

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/lens/what-life-looks-like-girls-18.html |

Nature Meet the Young Female Photographers Who Documented 18-Year-Old Girls, in 2018-10-11 13:03:37