Adolescence is a time when we begin to search out the structure of adulthood. What we are supposed to do to become an independent person is communicated to us in various verbal and nonverbal ways. These rules and the rituals and rites that are required of kids aren't always communicated effectively and a thick air of mystery can envelope a teenager.
The photographer Alison Malone produced a series of photographs about the Masonic Youth organization,
the Daughters of Job that explores this process by superimposing over it an organization that uses different rituals and rites to form its youths into adult leaders. Malone doesn't resort to displaying these girls as strange, she was once a Daughter of Job herself. The photographs of the meeting halls, the leaders, the various ritualistic items may seem foreign but the look, the essence Malone captures in her portraits of the girls is instantly familiar to anyone who ever looked in the mirror during puberty and wasn't quite sure who was looking back.
Malone's photographs evoke the eerie feeling of otherness, of strange in-betweenness that adolescence produces. But they also display the strength one requires to grow up.
