Ilya Lipkin

"How ......? ...... dog ......! ...... ass ......! ...... pig ......!"

– Holy Inanna to Cu-kale-tuda, Inana and Shu-kale-tuda, approx. 2200 B.C.

For this show Ilya Lipkin presents eleven candid photographs with fifteen young women subjects. All taken this year with a quick-focusing digital camera on burst mode in public places in several cities across the world, the images have been professionally retouched and edited to the standard of fashion photography; in most the background has been removed and replaced with a totalizing red or receding white.

Although many of the subjects certainly still call themselves girls, it is clear that these photographs are of and about women. In the younger ones especially I see the blank defiance of my teenage years, the awareness of holding a new currency. But because none of them are nerds, and none of them are fully immersed in some alternative subculture, it's clear that they want at this time to participate in society at large and therefore visible upon all of them are the abstractions required to achieve this. The women mostly betray the deeply middle-class sense of one's new attractiveness being in relation to the world.

These women exhibit a moment in popular vernacular uniform, protagonists in a global image system linked by commercial fashion and technology. They seem to intuitively deflect any insight into an interior life. How do the boys their age individuate them, how do they choose the girls they like, or become infatuated by? It might at this moment be considered political for a man to photograph young women, but it could as easily be a personal and moving reflection on what was a young man's fascination with and natural attraction to them, to the mystery of their attitude toward this transformation into a public being.

Present in the unmistakeable immediacy of these photos of the generation most aware of their own photographic image, taken with the latest technology at this particularly global moment in fashion after several years of feminist uprising is the old universal appeal of a woman thoughtfully considered.

- Elise Duryee-Browner