‘Between Girls’ offers an up-close view of a group of New York City middle-class girls as they age from 16 to 36 between the years 1985-2005. The 35-minute video combines black and white still images with audio and video footage.

A rumination on friendships among women, it explores the emotional bonding between girls at sixteen and their identity as women today. Their teenage years are seen through black and white photography narrated by the women in audio voiceover. This reflection deliberately does not identify the author of a thought but rather a group viewpoint on a shared adolescence. Later, through the use of color video interviews and moving and still images, the individual women are introduced.

Girls, regardless of their upbringing, often share the last vestige of childhood in mutual rituals, caretaking each other’s emergence into womanhood. This camera deliberately focuses on a configuration of friends that shared time in a common middle-class Manhattan neighborhood. While they were all involved with students from diverse racial and economic backgrounds, ‘Between Girls’ intentionally documents liaisons created close to home, often with friends they have known from middle school. The adolescent years offer an intimate view of the emotional lives of the girls. The death of one of the friends at seventeen ensures that one of them will always remain a teenager. As grown women, the interviews seek to reveal their diverse perspectives and individuality.

Relationships that women share are often complex. By illuminating the universality that embodies girls’ rituals of bonding at a critical age and the changing concerns that women have in relationship to each other, this work offers a glimpse at the influence of a mutual urban middle-class ideology. Collective ideas convert into individual histories and transform into testimonies about womanhood.

Sociologically they are urban, middle-class white women, born in 1969. Well-educated, with lives that have provided numerous opportunities, most are now stay-at-home moms living in and around New York City. Central to this project is not who they are in the world, but how they see themselves in relationship to their transformation from girls, to young women, into womanhood.