| In an era when the police can be summoned if you so much as produce a camera on a children’s playground, Julia Fullerton-Batten has made life deliberately difficult for herself. The London-based artist’s latest project focuses on the taboos of life in a teenage girls’ school. Bullying, humiliation, and occasional moments of sympathy can all be glimpsed in these pictures. Upon first glance, the images seem to be a digital montage of the same girl shot in different poses, but Fullerton-Batten reveals that the subjects are actually different girls wearing identical wigs and clothes. “While it looks like there was a tremendous amount of digital work involved,” she explains, “there was none at all. It was all shot conventionally on film. The only retouching was to remove the odd speck of dust or a hair.” | 
|
Julia Fullerton-Batten’s portrayals of adolescent girls give new meaning to the locker-room image.
In an era when the police can be summoned if you so much as produce a camera on a children’s playground, Julia Fullerton-Batten has made life deliberately difficult for herself. The London-based artist’s latest project focuses on the taboos of life in a teenage girls’ school. Bullying, humiliation, and occasional moments of sympathy can all be glimpsed in these pictures. Upon first glance, the images seem to be a digital montage of the same girl shot in different poses, but Fullerton-Batten reveals that the subjects are actually different girls wearing identical wigs and clothes. “While it looks like there was a tremendous amount of digital work involved,” she explains, “there was none at all. It was all shot conventionally on film. The only retouching was to remove the odd speck of dust or a hair.”
Fullerton-Batten chose not to hire models for this project. As a result, the girls featured in the images had to be culled from their native school environment. The photographer personally approached the school and sought permission from every parent. “It was a lot of work,” Fullerton-Batten recalls. “The production was big on this. First I had to get consent from the school to use their premises, and then I had to bring in all the schoolgirls. It’s getting harder and harder to photograph children under eighteen. There are so many regulations involved.”
But though the process was cumbersome, the results were well worth it. In Changing Room, Fullerton-Batten has confronted puberty and public humiliation closer together than they sit in the alphabet. A group of girls in skin-colored leotards surround a classmate standing uncomfortably in the middle of the room. Her hair is wet, and she is covering her body in a gesture of shame as a line of blood runs down her thigh and forms a puddle on the floor. The girl has her period: the unthinkable has happened in front of everyone. This is public humiliation of a kind that lends itself to later psychotherapy.
“I thought that I would be lucky to get away with the locker-room image,” Fullerton-Batten muses. “It was a very hard thing to do. The frames were all shot in one day, and I was heavily pregnant at the time. The girls were shy at first, but as the day went on and we continued to shoot, they became more relaxed.”
The photographer is now looking to shoot in Dubai, Mexico, and America because she wants to study how female teenagers behave in different countries. Even as she prepares to cross national borders, Fullerton-Batten wants to stress the common insecurities all teenagers share despite their cultural differences: “Teenage girls are very shy about their bodies. They were a sensitive taboo when I was growing up—girls didn’t talk about their bodies, and I think they are just as shy now. They don’t like to undress in front of each other. Girls going through puberty just want to hide.” Teenage girls everywhere may want to hide, but with Fullerton-Batten depicting their lifestyles and behaviors in a way that few would dare, they’ll have to learn to show themselves for a few moments in the spotlight.
