Lucy Ridgard photographs teenagers from in and around her hometown of Bury St Edmunds, in south-east England, a place that borders urban and country living. Her teenage subjects, who experiment with identity, expressions of otherness, and kinship to alternative fashion tribes, remind Lucy of her own youth growing up in East Anglia through the 1980s and 90s.
Both the photographer and her subjects share the common experience of growing up in a landscape of villages, small towns, cul-de-sacs, open roads, rivers, fields and haystacks that appears at odds with their edgy, self-constructed identities.
In order to reflect the tension between their inner and outer selves, and the colliding natural and urban environments in which they inhabit, Lucy takes the teenagers out of the town and poses and photographs them in the countryside. This has produced a series of images that juxtapose the ephemeral nature of fashion with the eternal and natural quest to know who we are, and to which tribe we belong.
Lucy’s photographs, shot on film and in colour, represent how the slow and sleepy countryside can offer an idyllic background for the passage of youth into adulthood; an environment of open skies and endless field in which to spread one’s wings and be bold, introspective, experimental or rebellious.
