Young Women Come Together at Photoville for "This Is 18"
A global portrait of being eighteen, made by women photographers, and a reminder of why print zines still matter.
In 2018, The New York Times published "This Is 18," an ambitious visual project about what it means to be an 18-year-old girl in different parts of the world. The project paired young women with women photographers across many countries. The result was a mosaic of school, work, faith, love, ambition and ordinary days. Editors including Jessica Bennett and Anya Strzemien were among the people behind it.
Why the project mattered
Most images of teenage girls are made by someone else: advertisers, news photographers, social feeds. This Is 18 turned that around. It commissioned women photographers, many of them from the regions they were documenting. It also built the stories around the girls' own words about their lives, worries and hopes. The project treated eighteen as what it is: the edge of adulthood, with very different stakes depending on where you happen to be born.
From screen to zine
The project also lived on paper. A printed zine and in-person events took it beyond the website. That's where Photoville comes in. The free outdoor photography festival, best known for exhibitions in repurposed shipping containers around Brooklyn Bridge Park, is a natural home for this kind of work. People walk in off the street, families wander through, and teenagers see faces that look like theirs on the walls.
A zine invites a different kind of attention than a scrolling feed. You hold it, flip back, linger on a portrait and pass it to a friend. Young women at gatherings like this tend to do just that: they compare the pictures to their own lives and talk about the ones that stuck with them.
Why it still resonates
- Representation by women, of women. Who holds the camera changes the picture.
- Global, but personal. Each image is specific. Together they show a shared stage of life.
- Print as community. Zines and festivals turn a media project into something people gather around.
See for yourself
Look for the original This Is 18 feature in The New York Times archive, and check Photoville's site for current festival dates. It returns to New York regularly and is free to attend. For more photography, see our Photography archive.
