Output details

The After School Club

Lovell, M (2008) "The After School Club" exhibited in "Teen City: The Adventure of Adolescence", at Musee d’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland from 15 June 2008 to 26 October 2008.

Curated by Natalie Herschdorfer and William A. Ewing, "Teen City" brought together the work of 19 international photographers whose practices explore adolescence – an age where identity and sexuality are in transition. Rather than generic portrayal of adolescence, the exhibition brought together work produced over the last ten years that dealt with a variety of issues.

I was invited to exhibit my series "The After School Club", which engages with ‘raunch culture’ (Levy, 2005) and investigates its relationship with feminism. The work features young women recruited to the project at school-themed nightclubs, and then returned to their secondary school gates to be photographed wearing their provocative revelers' garb. The resulting images are oddly comic, but there is a more powerful sense of melancholia; nostalgia mixed with the acid tinge of naivety corrupted and exploited.

McRobbie (2009) proposes melancholia as a metaphor for the various post-feminist afflictions, such as eating disorders and binge-drinking. She further suggests that young women’s contemporary melancholia embodies "the loss of the feminist ideal of liberty and equality" (p.115). Within the nightclub context, the girls' performances can seem liberating, through the adoption of an alternative persona. Yet they are also illustrative of what Levy (2005) terms 'raunch culture': where women need not worry about objectification or misogyny, and instead can simply "join the frat party" (p.4). This photographic work abruptly reports on how little seems to remain of the schoolyard openness and curiosity. Yet the suggestion is also that schools, as ‘disciplinary’ institutions within contemporary society, have in some way created adherents to the male gaze.

This work also contributes to my ongoing investigation of awkwardness. For the photographic subjects, the disjuncture of context and self results in what Probyn (2005) terms the "visceral sensation of shame" (p.39), coaxing the awkward revelation of modesty.