Teenage Alienation in the Spotlight

In the short autobiographical vignette Alien – 1965, writer and actress Cookie Mueller offers what may be a perfect glimpse into adolescence. “I was always leaving,” she writes. “Every time I left, I would have a different color of hair and stand on the porch saying goodbye to the older couple in the living room.” Mueller’s parents – with whom she had nothing in common except “a few inherited chromosomes, the same last name, and the same bathroom” – would yell and protest, but Mueller would ignore them, speeding off to who knows where and for who knows how long in her friends’ cars. And yet her relief at being away from home was always short-lived. “By then, I always realized there was another problem,” she continues. “Not only was I a stranger to my parents, I was a stranger to my friends.”

Not all young people are as tumultuous and itinerant as Mueller, whose frequent departures made her live a difficult life from Baltimore to San Francisco, from Orlando to Provincetown. But the sense of estrangement she describes—from her environment, from her family, from her peers—is, I think, a reliable indicator of the most conventional adolescent experience. It’s the kind of alienation that can be identified in the black-and-white photographs taken in the mid-1980s by Andrea Modica, now collected in “Catholic Girl,” a handsome volume recently published by L’Artiere.

Modica, a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia whose photography career spans four decades, was a young graduate student at Yale School of Art when she embarked on the project that would become “Catholic Girl.” One spring day in 1984, it was snowing unseasonably, and she decided to take the subway to visit a former art teacher at her alma mater, a Catholic girls’ high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She was carrying, as she almost always did, her large-format 8×10 camera, and when she arrived at the school, she decided to ask a few students if she could take their portraits.

“There are people who instinctively know how to take a picture, and I wasn’t one of them,” Modica told me during our recent phone conversation. “So I’ve always been very diligent in taking pictures, always learning.” Still, she seemed to instinctively sense that photographing these schoolgirls, who were only a few years younger than she, would be a fruitful experience. “I recognized something that I had faced in my high school years, something both horrible and wonderful,” she said. “And I had the privilege of unpacking it through these photos.”

The first photo Modica took at school was of two girls: one is 19 or 20, the other maybe 16 or 17. In the photo, the girls face the camera menacingly, posing against the wall of a building; the path below is lined with the residue of recent snow. The younger of the two wears a kilt dress, knee-length black socks, and a plain headband—a textbook illustration of a Catholic schoolgirl. The teenager, however, has already begun to break away from the expectations of her environment. With her lacquered hair in a 1980s pouf, long earrings, and unevenly rumpled socks tucked into ballet flats, she is almost a woman, negotiating her emerging role. Standing side by side, the two students read like two adjacent points on a childhood timeline. (Could the next point be the unseen young photographer taking the picture – a former Catholic schoolgirl herself?)

Modica continued to take photographs at the Bay Ridge school and at a few Catholic schools in New Haven. She often photographed the students she met in pairs. Like Diane Arbus’s famous 1967 photograph of identical seven-year-old twins in dark dresses facing the camera, Modica’s paired photographs highlight the tension between individuality and similarity. The girls in her photographs are not twins, but they are like twins: they share the same hairstyle, the same uniforms, the same accessories. And yet, one can also sense that each girl is distancing herself from the other. In one image, two girls are seen, their dark hair styled in similar ways, wearing Members Only jackets and plaid skirts. Hands buried deep in their pockets, they stand, one with a bare, bent knee almost touching the other’s. It’s as if they’re drawn to each other by a magnetic force, the power of which abruptly stops, halted by each girl’s impenetrable force field. In another image, two students in matching winter coats, skirts, and black tights are distinguished only by their hairstyles—one short, the other long—and their shoes, one of which has white laces. The image is reminiscent of a “spot the differences” puzzle, prompting us to ask not just what makes a person, but also what makes a girl.

When I spoke to Modica, she emphasized the importance of the 8×10 camera in her practice. It’s a bulky, unwieldy tool, but using it produces incredibly sharp and luminous results. (Modica also develops its own film and produces its own platinum prints.) Because each shot requires a long preparation time, the camera also makes the subjects feel as if they’re posing for a formal portrait. That was certainly the case with the “Catholic Girl” series. “It was such a slow, collaborative process,” Modica told me. “And the girls were so generous.” Looking at the photos, we can see that gravity on the students’ faces, as if they realize that their encounter with Modica gives them a unique opportunity to be seen and understood, no matter how alien they might feel, even to themselves.