Visual & conceptual reference - Jocelyn Lee

I discovered the work of Jocelyn Lee through the Washington National Portrait Gallery's website, as her work was exhibited alongside two other photographers that I began to look at for this project, Alec Soth & Katy Grannan. 

The concept of Lee's work is hugely relevant to my chosen subject, and many of photographic series focus around the theme of female insecurity and childhood innocence. Her series titled 'Minor Stories' is a body of work that I am particularly interested in as she explores the idea of adolescence.

"To be a teenager is to be both beautiful and fragile simultaneously. Puberty engenders a radical physical transformation and psychological contradiction: it occasions the arrival of genital hair and breasts, stretching limbs and acne, coupled with ridiculous arrogance, identity confusion, sexual desire and colt-like beauty." - Jocelyn Lee

Her series titled 'Minor Stories' illustrates the contemporary physical and psychological complexities of teenage experience. When I flick through the images in this work I can't help but feel the vulnerability in these adolescence through their vacant - and sometimes confrontational - stare. I believe that the reason I am so interested in this work - and the subject of adolescence - is because I am aware that the transition from youth to adulthood is so fast, and I am keen to capture it before its gone. It is a unique period in that the greater part of life is still to come and the sense of potential seems limitless, yet, in actuality, every teen is grounded in the objective realities of family, race, gender, economics and geography while managing the adolescent struggle with social anxiety, peer pressure and self-doubt.

Jocelyn Lee encourages us to think about issues such as youth and age, our connections with the photograph as well as one another, our relationship with nature, and the place we call home. She states,

"The physical landscape serves as a backdrop on which human drama unfolds. The photographs allude to the fragility of the human presence in the world. These portraits are a way to look at particular people and the human body as a part of nature, evolving and expressing their identity and place in life's cycles."