Deanna Templeton and the Universal Teenage Girl
‘It was really interesting for me to reread my thoughts and it made me sad to remember how much pain I was in. It felt like I was reading about someone else.’
- Deanna Templeton in What She Said.
I’ve been keeping a diary since I was a teenager and what I write in it today is pretty much the same as it was then. I offload and describe the mundane details of my day; what I’ve eaten, the weather and contemplate who I might want to fuck, kiss or kill. Then as now I can trace where I am in my menstrual cycle at the time of writing within the first few lines of any given entry. Occasionally nowadays I might make notes for so-called real writing but they’re few and far between. The only significant change is that at some point over the past 15 years I started calling it a journal instead of a diary, kidding myself that ‘keeping a journal’ sounds more writerly and sophisticated than the overly emotional slop that actually makes up its insides.
With this in mind I’m impressed at the bravery of photographer Deanna Templeton on the publication of her latest book What She Said, published earlier this year by Mack. What She Said is a collection of photographs of teenage girls taken by Deanna on the streets of Europe, Australia, Russia and the US. The portraits are presented alongside ephemera collected from the depths of Deanna’s own mid-eighties adolescence, including gig posters, ticket stubs and excerpts from her teenage diaries.
In the book’s introduction Deanna writes, ‘the experience of growing up female is universal no matter which era’ and although I broadly disagree with any sweeping declarations of universality her statement is backed up by her portraits, the dates of which are undisclosed and almost impossible to guess. The girls are mostly dressed deliberately scruffy and they stare down the camera with facial expressions that I can only describe as a kind of soft defiance. Their outfits and hairstyles uniformly reference 1960s to 1990s music and subculture, combining clashing elements of goth, rocker, grunge and punk. In one black and white portrait a girl sits in a satin butterfly-print slip dress with the word ‘void’ tattooed on her left clavicle and ‘if I die I won’t cry’ on the delicate skin above the inside of her elbow. The iPhone beside her is the only thing that dates the portrait conclusively within the past ten years. There are exceptions of course but I take comfort in these tropes of adolescence. I shouldn’t admit this publicly, but I always like seeing teens huddled in little gangs and sharing cigarettes because it reminds me of that bored and reckless feeling that becomes unsustainable as you get older. No illicit cigarette will ever taste as good in your twenties or thirties as it did in your teens.
Music, boys, body and death hang heavily throughout young Deanna’s diary entries. These painful and banal realities of teenage life create a perfect storm of heady hormonal depression, culminating in a dress-rehearsal suicide note addressed to Deanna’s parents, brother and ‘anyone else that matters’. Reflecting on the note in the book’s introduction, Deanna says: ‘I wished I could go back and hug that person and tell her she’s going to be all right. Other times I would laugh out loud at how dramatic I was.’ There is a soft underbelly of humour that plays out in Deanna’s performative depression. In a postscript to her suicide note, after signing her name off beneath that of Sid Vicious and Jim Morrison, Deanna writes: ‘let everyone no (sic) it was a suicide, otherwise this dying was a waste.’ The influence of pop culture runs deep and dramatic even through the most tender of broken hearts.
I’m not afraid to admit that What She Said inspired me to pull out my few surviving teenage diaries to see how my mid-‘00s dial-up and MySpace adolescence measured up to Deanna’s and I was touched to see the similarities between them. Like Deanna I spent years holding my face, body and parents in deep contempt. In my own diaries— alongside self-penned lyrics with flimsily veiled references to my crush’s premature ejaculation and pages about how Clearasil is a capitalist scam—are epigrams copied down from Kurt Cobain such as ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away’ and ‘I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I’m not’. The frustration and boredom are palpable. Like Deanna, part of me wants to reach back through the years and to tell myself that things will turn out ok in the end. The other admittedly larger part wants to go back and laugh in my own face for being such a drama queen. It’s impossible to get back to that place of bored, depressed naiveté once you’ve waded through the mists of adulthood and I suppose that’s the gulf that makes teenagers eternally misunderstood.
The will to scrawl seems to burn through teenage psyches no matter what era their adolescence takes place under. Perhaps it’s a reaction to how temporary everything feels in young adulthood, our lack of full autonomy makes us lash out and scratch our primal territorial marks wherever we can. Nearly all the girls featured in What She Said have scars and tattoos on their bodies, both temporary and permanent. One of the most striking portraits that Deanna has captured of this phenomenon is of a girl lifting her t-shirt to reveal a belly darkened with sharpie graffiti that extends down over and across her jeans. The overburdened teenage ego cannot be contained and so it spills out across the body in pen marks and wounds. I grew up with strict parents whose relatively old-fashioned ideas about how late I should stay out and what I should put on my body meant most of the time I walked around feeling like a swelling river about to burst its banks. I scribbled Hole lyrics all over my brand new Converse All Stars in pathetic rebellion. Lucky for me I was always too scared to take a tiny blade to my skin like some of my friends did and a lot of the girls featured in What She Said. Instead, I settled for writing curses and more grunge lyrics all over my arms and hiding them from my mum by pulling my sleeves down over my thumbs through self-made holes in the cuffs of my school jumper. I suppose my rebellion was more about catharsis than self-harm.
Perhaps one of the most gorgeous things about What She Said is how Deanna uses the process of collating objects from her past to carve a coherent narrative out of the darkness of her adolescence. In a series of diary excerpts starting in early 1988, Deanna introduces Ed. On January 20th she writes, ‘I have a growing crush on Ed, he has pretty eyes.’ And less than a month later, ‘Ann called, she talked to Ed, Ed says he really loves me that he wants to be together 4-ever.’ This romantic coda at the curtain call of Deanna’s tumultuous teen years, interwoven throughout the portraits of other girls in the midst of their own provides a ray of golden light at the end of the tunnel. On May 30th, 1988, after a tender teenage love storm Deanna and Ed sleep together for the first time. On her nineteenth birthday Deanna writes, ‘Me and Ed got to be together, we went to dinner with my dad. I think my dad really is starting to like him. Then we came to my house, we made love then I took him home.’ This final diary entry in the book reads as a love letter to the blossoming of both their relationship and Deanna herself into a calmer and more autonomous womanhood.
Though their relationship is an unrealistic standard for how most early fumbling liaisons pan out—they’re still together today after marrying in 1991—I can allow Deanna the indulgence of concluding What She Said on a hopeful and romantic note. Even though the performative agony of my own teen years seemed to extend into the upper reaches of my early twenties, if the so-called universal experience of being a teenage girl in this world is one of pain and drama, then we at least deserve the possibility of a happy ending.