How long does it take to ‘come of age’? Is it a rambling journey or an event that passes in a blink? Or could it be a moment that feels both fleeting and eternal? The portraits in Logan White’s Hearts Content Road don’t provide a clear answer to this temporal conundrum (and maybe there isn’t one).
Instead, the fantastical scenes that unfold in front of her lens open up a strangeness of time as it is experienced when teetering on the edge of girlhood. Forever interested in the feminine subconscious—and the process of bringing it out of the body and mind and into reality through photography—White’s young female protagonists are memorialized in an imaginary cocoon of time and space that will soon vanish.
In her lightly surreal images, internal and external worlds mix and mingle. Born in Georgia and raised in the Deep American South, White’s work is intimate with the relationship between body and place, heavily shaped by what she describes as the “magnetism of the haunted south and the emotional intensity of the Romantic period.” Mainly photographing young women and girls, her pictures are imbued with a search for freedom amidst the restraints placed on the female body, shaped by her own experience as “a young creative girl trying to express herself in the bible belt” for which she faced censorship and aggression.
Hearts Content Road is set in Upstate New York shot with girls from the local area. It is within the four wood-paneled walls of a nostalgic domestic space that the cast of these photographs play out the swansong of their girlhood. In her carefully styled and staged images, White stills time to create a space for the boredom, fantasy, kinship and awkwardness of adolescence to emerge. In opposition to “immediate and impersonal image-making” of the Internet era, she shoots on medium-format pursuing a slower and more intimate relationship between the photographer and her muses.
Deep interior worlds are alight just below the surface of the girls’ mysterious stares, revealed by White’s flash. Lounging on beds, hiding under tables, squeezed between beds, they are sometimes alone, sometimes together, sometimes an eerie, solitary hand creeping into a lonely frame; the tight bonds of friendship are palpable as is the overarching feeling of isolation.
Though dressed in prim white tights, frilly socks and black patent shoes, there’s a sense of restlessness in the air, the wilderness of the outside world present on the muddy soles of one of the girls. In the last picture of the sequence, a group portrait where three gazes meet ours, a view onto a luscious green exterior gestures towards the end of this coming of age and the unknowns of the future that lie just beyond the door.