We've just released two editions by Rachel Papo, drawing from separate projects, Serial No. 3817131 and Desperately Perfect. While the two young women in these photographs exist in distant geographic spheres of the world--Russia and Israel, respectively--their experiences and postures share an alarming similarity. As Jen notes in her newsletter, both of these subjects are in the midst of years where youth and womanhood have begun to mingle, and share a simultaneous sense of experience, ambition, and duty, while also enduring a period of physical awkwardness and emotional uncertainty.
Desperately Perfect glimpses into the lives of competitive adolescent dancers in St. Petersburg, Russia while Serial No. 3817131 delves into the rigor of female soldiers in the Israeli army, who leave their homes at age 18 for a mandatory period of service. Both projects resonate with Papo's own experiences as a former soldier and dancer, and how one maintains their individuality in institutions that value uniformity either in costume or in physical form.
Of the project Serial No. 3817131 she writes,
My service had been a period of utter loneliness, mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all.
Both pieces featured here hone in on adolescents who have to come to terms with an "uncompromising reality" as Papo did more than a decade ago. She stretches her own emotional ties to navigate into the lives and feelings of those experiencing what she has before and lets her camera lead the way.
Papo's work is also currently exhibited at Clamp Art through March 14, 2009. Desperately Perfect is in the main gallery and Serial No. 3817131 is in the project gallery.