Y O U N G S K I N S
by Anne Worthington
There’s always a borderline where you belong and where you don’t. Not all borders are physical, not all of them are signposted. I often take photographs of people who are behind invisible borders, who are at the brink of something. These photographs are part of a documentary that started in 2002 about young people at the brink of adult life, but not there yet. No longer children, they are making sense of the world that’s opening up for them and trying out identities. Their lives are framed in the landscape of a city that creates collisions with the adult world, sometimes thrown all the way in by circumstances.
The kids who say they belong here, they’re part of this place, part of what it’s about. The kid who says that what they want most of all is to live with their mum again. The kid who says they didn’t need school; it taught them nothing about the world in front of them. The kid who’s bullied and doesn’t want to be anywhere anymore. The kids who see what’s ahead of them and feel ready for it, they want it now.
Some think this is the best age of our lives before adulthood takes this idyll away. Some think this is an age where life is yet to be embarked upon. Some might consider these photographs hint at what these young people are already embarking on, that life is partly mapped out and pre-determined for many of us, and our idea of what we expect from the world, already formed.
About The Artist
Anne Worthington is a documentary photographer and writer who picked up a camera and taught herself photography as a way of showing what she saw around her. Featured in the British Culture Archive and Café Royal Books, she has produced a body of work that shows the effects of the social and economic changes that had begun in the 1980’s. Turning to writing as another way of showing what she’s seen, her first novel, The Unheard, won the Michael Schmidt Prize.
