Photography: Maya Fuhr photographs artists against pages from their diaries

Date
3 March 2014

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.

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Diary Girls: Agathe Snow. Photographed by Maya Fuhr, art directed by Maya Fuhr and Nicole Dagenais, commissioned by BULLETT Magazine

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Diary Girls: Agnes Thor. Photographed by Maya Fuhr, art directed by Maya Fuhr and Nicole Dagenais, commissioned by BULLETT Magazine

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Diary Girls: Chloe Wise. Photographed by Maya Fuhr, art directed by Maya Fuhr and Nicole Dagenais, commissioned by BULLETT Magazine

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Diary Girls: Jeanette Hayes. Photographed by Maya Fuhr, art directed by Maya Fuhr and Nicole Dagenais, commissioned by BULLETT Magazine

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Diary Girls: Maryanne Casasanta. Photographed by Maya Fuhr, art directed by Maya Fuhr and Nicole Dagenais, commissioned by BULLETT Magazine

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Diary Girls: Naomi Yasui. Photographed by Maya Fuhr, art directed by Maya Fuhr and Nicole Dagenais, commissioned by BULLETT Magazine

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Diary Girls: Olivia Bee. Photographed by Maya Fuhr, art directed by Maya Fuhr and Nicole Dagenais, commissioned by BULLETT Magazine

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Diary Girls: Sara Cwynar. Photographed by Maya Fuhr, art directed by Maya Fuhr and Nicole Dagenais, commissioned by BULLETT Magazine

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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