---
title: "American girlhood, on the girls’ own terms"
description: "A Belgian photographer spent six years taking the portraits of 400 girls across 28 states"
author: "Albion Grey"
published: 2026-09-28T08:38:22.505Z
modified: 2026-09-28T14:16:34Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/american-girlhood-on-the-girls-own-terms-36369c
language: en
tags: ["photography", "gender", "art", "teenagers", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# American girlhood, on the girls’ own terms

*A Belgian photographer spent six years taking the portraits of 400 girls across 28 states*

By Albion Grey · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/american-girlhood-on-the-girls-own-terms-36369c

## In brief

- Eva Verbeeck photographed 400 girls aged six to 18 across 28 US states over six years
- “America’s Girls, On the Edge of a Dream” is out this month as a monograph from GOST Books
- Sitters chose their own clothes and props, from cheerleading uniforms to a new bike and some rocks
- Exhibitions accompany the book in Belgium and at the Savannah Center for Photography in Georgia
- The girls’ interviews are not published; portraits carry only a first name and age, with no location

For decades America exported an image of its girlhood — glossy, sequined and faintly unreal — to anyone with a television or a magazine rack. Eva Verbeeck grew up on the receiving end, in Tessenderlo, a small farming town about 44 miles outside Brussels, poring over *Vanity Fair*, *Vogue* and *Elle* bought at her local bookshop and pining the best pages to her bedroom wall. Her adolescent horizons were set by two pop supernovas, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. “Especially Britney,” she told CNN on a recent video call. “She really had this lore around her of the ‘American girl.’”

Two decades on, Ms Verbeeck has photographed the originals. A project begun in 2018, when she had been living in America for several years and working as a photojournalist on fast-paced political assignments, grew into a six-year portrait series of 400 young women and girls aged six to 18, shot across 28 states. “America’s Girls, On the Edge of a Dream” is published this month as a monograph by GOST Books, with accompanying exhibitions at Cultuurcentrum De Factorij in Belgium and the Savannah Center for Photography in Georgia.

The method mattered as much as the pictures. Working with a large-format camera that dictated the pace of each sitting, Ms Verbeeck recruited through open calls to schools, clubs, youth groups and local organisers, rejecting street casting so that every sitter genuinely wanted to take part. Each girl chose an object or an article of clothing tied to her character. Cheerleaders, marching-band members, athletes and Girl Scouts turned up in uniform; others brought pets, a favourite outfit or simply a best friend. One girl arrived with the bike she had received the day before. Another brought some rocks.

The first portrait set the tone. Jazmine, an 11-year-old cheerleader with the Savannah Sharks, sat in a gym glittering with sequins, her eyelids painted blue to match her uniform, holding the camera’s gaze cautiously. “I remember taking the first photo and thinking how perfect it was,” says Ms Verbeeck, now based between Brussels and Amsterdam but living in Georgia at the time. The picture became the book’s cover; the sitter’s obvious youth undoes the heavily sexualised screen image of cheerleaders from the photographer’s own teens, typically portrayed on film by adult women.

Letting sitters choose how to appear is, Ms Verbeeck argues, a quiet break with art history, in which women were painted as future wives, muses or daughters of nobility. “Traditionally their names were never mentioned and they wouldn’t have chosen what they were wearing — it was forced, or the artist made it up,” she says. Telling each girl, in effect, that she cared how they wished to be seen “became an important piece of the puzzle.”

Conversation did the rest. The girls, she found, cared less about the camera than about being listened to. “This generation has been photographed a lot, they have a lot of photos of themselves, and a lot of photos of themselves they like,” she says. “But because young women often aren’t taken seriously, me as an adult being genuinely curious became this beautiful interaction. Mostly the girls just wanted you to listen to their opinions.”

None of what they said appears in the book — each portrait is captioned only with a first name and an age, with no location given. But the talks shaped the work. “They feel a lot of responsibility,” Ms Verbeeck says of a cohort raised on round-the-clock news via Instagram and TikTok. “I heard a lot of girls talk about being scared of climate change or war.” America spent a century selling the world a myth of its girlhood. The charm of this project is that the girls are finally holding the frame themselves.