Photography: Maya Fuhr photographs artists against pages from their diaries

Maya Fuhr first popped up on our radar with her incredible series Garbage Girls, in which she photographed girls in their very very messy bedrooms, to brilliant effect. She’s back now with a new project Diary Girls, made in collaboration with art director Nicole Dagenais. They shot some of their favourite female artists for the series for BULLETT Magazine – Agathe Snow, Jeanette Hayes and Sara Cwynar among them – in front of huge blown-up pages from the artists’ personal diaries. The resulting photographs are oddly exposing; secret reflections, drawings, collages and self-portraits all feature on the extracted pages, which function more like a window into the soul than simply a piece of artwork.

And this is exactly what makes Maya’s work so utterly original; her portraits hinge on the details, where other photographers are hell-bent on simply photographing a pretty face. Even more interestingly, by taking common preconceptions about girls – from messy bedrooms, to confessions about boys scribbled in their diaries – and exaggerating them to the point that they’re completely subverted, she’s creating a malleable and personal image of femininity that’s harder to capture than a thief in the night. We can’t wait to see what she does next.