Photographer Evangeline Davis creates tender portraits of New Zealand girls

Photographs by Angeline Davis

Article by Amy Campbell for i-D, 11 October 2016

In her new book 'Touchy' Evangeline explores the lovely awkwardness of being a girl.

Evangeline Davis takes photos that remind you of long, semi forgotten summer afternoons with friends. The ones when you were too old to play and too young to do pretty much anything else, so you'd borrow your mum's camera and pass the hours staging haphazard photoshoots. It's not surprising the Wellington native offers such a clear vision of fragile girlhood, barely graduated from university she's still comparatively close to those chapped lips, scraped knees and flushed faces.

Her graduate photo book Touchy took her all over New Zealand in search of girls to shoot. Somewhere along the way she realised she'd collected an uncultivated fan-following, an inbox full of work requests and a lot of new friends. They were drawn to her work, but also her sense of openness and empathy. She shot them on film, observing "girls feel more comfortable without the review button."

You primarily photograph young women, what are you looking to explore in your images?

The photos I've been taking recently have had me questioning a lot of things I always just accepted when I was growing up: Like how we get our beauty standards from fashion and the media, but how these aren't reflected in real life at all. I wanted to be a fashion photographer at first, but explsure to the industry showed me the representation of girls within fashion was so narrow. It's not as narrow now, but a few years ago it was just all white, stick-thin… I couldn't see myself in those girls. I think that's when I decided I wanted to photograph girls in a different way.

Tell us about Touchy, your photo book and graduation project.

I chose the title because I thought it implied a "touchy subject," and also because a lot of my photos are quite textural. I've shot around 60 girls all together, it's been really hard deciding what photos to include in the final book. I've been travelling to the North Island to shoot a lot, but I've also been able to do heaps in Wellington. I've learnt so much from the girls I've shot. Every time I get behind the camera I'm like, "wow! If I was like you when I was 17, life would have been so much less of a hassle!"

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