Girls’ Bedrooms: Mirrors and Windows
© RiverboomGetting to see girls’ bedrooms must have been a teenage obsession for the members of the all-male photographic collective Riverboom. Now that they have more or less grown up, they have decided to transform that dream into a reality.
Riverboom’s Gabriele Galimberti and Edoardo Delille are traveling the five continents to see where girls, between the ages of 18 and 30, sleep.
They have discovered that girls’ bedrooms are much more then just places where they lay down their heads – they are the places where girls read, love, dream, work and play.
In a world that is increasingly shaped by global standardisation and IKEA aesthetics, this work explores the rooms of the conventional and the eccentric, the rich and the poor, the mother and the single, the pious and the unbelieving, the sports-obsessed and the shopping-addicted, the tomboy and the girly-girl, the tidy and the shambolic.
From Argentina to Zimbabwe, from a veiled girl in Dubai to a naturist in Kiev, from a dominatrix in London to a transvestite in Beirut, from a house in Haiti with no running water or electricity to a nouveau-riche palace in China, we are led on a guided tour to places we normally would not be able to enter.
The selection of the subjects photographed is not based on their looks or on the decor of their rooms, but on a desire to show how diverse these can be, as well as on the strength of the story behind them. For instance, Riverboom met an American policewoman of Iraqi origin sharing her room with her two children, the leading dancer of the Istanbul Opera Ballet, the daughter of a 9/11 victim living in New York and an independent-minded Kenyan living on her own in a very conservative society.
These bedrooms are the mirrors of the history, personality, culture, obsessions and social status of the girls that occupy them, but are also unique windows into these young women’s worlds.
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