this makes them look really stupid

Dreadful! Where is the art in picking the worst images of these girls? The pictures aren’t haunting they are terrible.

“Awkward” my ass, the photographer captures these girls in moments of distraction where they look like mindless zombies — not like humans, much less young women, much less real people with personalities. Demeaning, nasty work. It doesn’t matter that the photographer is a woman — people can exploit those of the same sex. I sometimes like the artwork posted on Flavorpill but this is crap.

The photos are supposed to be non-poses. They are supposed to be authentic and real and try to invert our expectations of “portraits of teen girls”. They look normal, self-conscious and fidget-y. Just like real girls. I’m not sure how this is demeaning.

This is crap. The photographer didn’t catch anything interesting, just them with their eyes closed. It seems like several of them were told to play with their hair, how candid is that? I wish the photographer captured their actual personalities, not just unflattering AND uninteresting shots. I believe these girls had a lot more to offer in terms of personality and candid moments.

nick, re: playing w/ their hair… from the intro: “She gets them just getting ready to pose, that is, not posed at all.” so uh, that’s the reason for that. most girls (and women, in my experience), arrange their hair right before they get their picture taken ;)

Yup…if you can’t produce worthy art, show us your crap and call it ‘art’.
Oh well…no worse than what passes for television these days!

@mmm There’s nothing authentic or real about the split-second moments captured by the camera in these shots – it’s the opposite. The unaided human eye could not catch moments like this. I’ll pile on with the rest of the negatives on these. I don’t make a habit of judging people’s work (usually if I don’t like something I will just ignore it), but these seem particularly tedious and empty to me.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with publishing unflattering photos – especially if they communicate something interesting or meaningful. But I agree that these photos are demeaning because they are both unflattering and without artistic merit – they come across as a gimmick.

WOW! Watch out, Diane Arbus!

I like these portraits because they show an unpretty aspect of puberty that is almost always present in girls this age.
“Deeply fascinated, I would watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady and made that national grimace of feminine resignation (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping sideways) which, in an infantile form, I had seen Lo making herself.” –Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

If a young girl is told she is to be photographed by a proffessional photographer for series of photos to be published then the last thing she will look like is what is depicted here! I think they were posed, given the instruction to look as bored and disinterested at the whole proceedings as possible. Then the very worse photos were chosen for impact.

Good work, if inconsistent, but may be a one-trick pony. You don’t want to be taking these kinds of photographs your entire life, even if the girls you photograph keep posing this way for you in the morning after a long night at the shopping mall with them and their cellphones off and their grandmothers wondering why aren’t they back home on a school night. Still, this is in the tradition of, if not Arbus, at least “American Gothic”. If you had real spunk, you’d take this project to Capitol Hill. People making decisions really know how to play with their hair, and other things. Or how about getting the Nobel Committee to pose? That would be a picture very few of us could replicate.

This is stunt photography.

You have often have great material here but please stop biting off of aperture’s research and publication. it’s hurting a great organization and publication, and almost always without any credit.

These are creepy and have no redeeming artistic value!

Except for maybe the hair twirling, such images say little about puberty and this kind of unguarded moment or ‘awkwardness’ could be captured by a camera in anyone of any age.

These are awful photographs and not worthy of public scrutiny. You guys are trying to hard to be ‘edgy’.

Haunting Portraits? More like bad outtakes from headshot sittings. If I were the photographer, I would demand you take my name off of this collection of disastrous snaps; it would only lead to less work!

awful and stupid. contrived. boring. pointless…

I agree with a previous comment – trying too hard te be edgy. I find these shots boring and not very creative at all. If you’re going to catch teenagers being teenagers, then I suggest visiting a high school or a popular hangout to really catch them in their element.

I like photo #5 quite a bit. To me it authentically captures the distracted and bored state teenagers sometimes find themselves in. I don’t think the rest of the photos tell a very strong story.
In fact I find them a bit silly.

This is not authentic art. Contrived, trite, and shallow.

I really like taking pictures of the moments leading up to a posed portrait. It can definitely capture the essence of a person. This body of work, however, does NOT capture the essence of the subjects, with the exeption of #8. I don’t think there is much validity in the moment when someone’s eyes are rolling and they look like a zombie. Whoever told Julia Peirone these pictures are worth something are only encouraging her to produce un-engaging work that is “Artsy” but is actually more like piles of cow dung.

In portrait photography, outtakes are often the most compelling because the subject is caught offguard. I think it’s an interesting project to make all the images about the outtake. As an artist/photographer and parent of two teenage daughters I find these to be quite accurate depictions of girls at that age as a whole. Kids at that age can be stupid, self absorbed and awkward just like these photos. The individual images aren’t as successful as the whole project because they comment generically on this age and not necessarily on the individual subject. I don’t find them haunting (more goofy or awkward), poor choice of words for the title (obviously Flavorpill trying to garner attention).

I KNEW all those crappy pictures I deleted were art!!

Wow, I wasn’t expecting such puritanical responses to the work here. While I do think these are more posed than the artist would like us to believe, I’m actually kind of shocked by how uptight so many of you are about these and how she treated her subjects.

As one or two isolated images, they are interesting. As a series, it wears itself out as a conceit rather quickly, perhaps because the subjects all look interchangeable, both in terms of their presented style and the stilted manner in which they are photographed.

The photographer is trying to hard to create art me thinks. Maybe she intentionally tried to capture these moments that would typically be the “bad” frames… Intention doesn’t make it good or interesting or whatever. It is an insult to Diane Arbus to compare this work to her’s. Unflattering portraits are fine, awkward portraits are fine… these, to my eye, have no value as art, portraits, documentation… I’m all for a WIDE definition of what is art but this falls outside even that generous range.

Can’t say I’m impressed. I have a hundred photos of my wife in mid-blink or contorted face (she has a talent for that.) it seems the artist just took the shots where something went wrong. I don’t get any insight into puberty or awkwardness. They just look like bad photos. I thought that several of the girls were twirling their hair was interesting. I can see how gum appearing in the photo might saw something about maturity. I bet the better photos are when you can see their eyes.

It sounded like a good idea and the cover piece is successful however the photos when shown together tend to do the same thing over and over. There isn’t enough to the body of work to keep it interesting. The girls looked like they were falling asleep and so was I.

These evoke nothing at all from me. Besides this concept has been done many times. I’ll put the emphasis on ‘has been’.

It was kind of an interesting idea that just didn’t work. Aren’t there awkward moments one could catch candidly without taking the split second of eyes mid-blink?

@Heather: “I like these portraits because they show an unpretty aspect of puberty that is almost always present in girls this age.”

But that’s the thing about that age. All I remember from being 13 and 14 – particularly about how I looked – is feeling like I looked like that all the time. I don’t feel like these girls were like popular or mean, caught in a moment of looking silly – I feel like these are probably girls (no matter how awkward or mean) who feel like they look pretty much that ridiculous all the time. So it sorta sucks to imortalize how awkward they are – I suppose because instead of affirming us in our awkwardness as adolescents, saying “yes, you were awkward, but you got through it”, it’s more like “look how awkward adolescents are” without getting a deeper understanding of how difficult that time is for everyone, and how mean we can be to each other like actually just because we are that age. I remember very keenly how awkward I was, thanks a lot. I agree that it doesn’t show them as people – and the other thing I remember about being adolescent is that I did think about stuff, and talk about that stuff with my friends. You can combine affirming that it’s ok to be an awkward teenager without neglecting to present them as totally reasonable human beings.

Wake up white people.