'American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD)'
Abstract
This essay was originally published in 1999, at the height of the art world's interest in photographs of adolescent girls. In it, Soutter provides one of the few accounts that took this work seriously, offering conceptual frameworks within the history of art photography as well as attempting to understand its seductive quality via the context of fashion and pornographic photography. Soutter argues for the importance of understanding the narrative ambiguity of these staged photographs, and traces teh possible routes for reading these images of girls as critical of or complicit with the sexualised imagery of girlhood found in popular culture. Her comments on nudity and the parthenogenic nature of celebrity indicate some of the ways in which these photographs of girls can be read as delicately balanced postfeminist representations, a possibility which Soutter more fully acknowledges in her afterword, written a decade after this article was first published -- Catherine Grant and Lori Waxma
