Melissa Ann Pinney

Melissa Ann Pinney’s series, “Regarding Emma” is a tender portrait of American girls as they make their way from infancy to adulthood. Using her daughter, Emma’s, childhood as a point of departure, she traces the complex terrain of adolescence. The results are intimate color mages of budding femininity marked by empathy and grace. Her book, under the same title, was published in 2003. She writes, “My mother, at seventy years of age, told me that every time she looked in the mirror she wondered who “that old bat” was looking back at her. In her mind’s eye, she still had the face she had at eighteen…In my photographs I see the early cultivation of the woman-in-the-girl and the corresponding persistence of the child-in-the-woman to which my mother referred. Girlhood may be understood as a part of a continuum that women revisit, regardless of age, as Emma allows me to revisit and photograph aspects of girlhood in a way not possible before she was born.” - www.blueskygallery.org