2014 is looking a lot like the year of the girls. Not women, ladies or females – girls.
From the cover of Vogue to the primetime set of Saturday Night Live, Lena Dunham of famed HBO television show Girls, is currently everywhere. Meanwhile, singer-songwriter Pharrell Williams, who got himself in a bit of a pickle last year for writing the chauvinistic lyrics for the summer hit single Blurred Lines, is repenting by describing his latest album, coincidentally named G I R L, as a “celebration” of womankind.
The new book Swedish Girls – A Tribute – created by an all-female quartet made up of photographers Nina Andersson and Louise Enhörning, creative director and stylist Amanda Johansson and graphic designer Nina Tahko – aims to bring the spotlight to our native girls by portraying a hundred women in their own habitat over a period of five years.
“We wanted to put together a book that feels like a document of the girls of today,” says creative director Amanda Johansson.
Johansson, who has over 15 years of experience working as a stylist, explains that the idea came about once she noticed that many of the models looked so much better when they walked into the studio fresh-faced and chipper, before getting all made up and styled. “We wanted to capture them in their own environment and with their own clothes and make-up,” she says.
The photos, bound together in the 600 pink, snakeskin-printed editions, are extremely intimate and private, but never voyeuristic. As active subjects, the outcome is very much a result of the collaboration between model and photographer.
Swedish Girls – A Tribute is published by indie publishing house Argent Books, and is currently available on their website or at Papercut in Stockholm.