Author Description

This work is edited by Christopher Coppock, Karen Downey. It includes texts by David Goldblatt, Helen Lucey. Michelle Sank is a consummate documentary photographer whose portraiture reflects a preoccupation with the human condition. Her sensitive method of working and the trust that she builds with her subjects is a critical factor in realising her pictures and gives her empathetic but charged studies an authorship and authenticity which can be both revealing and intimate at the same time. Here, the artist explores the way young boys and girls interpret their understanding of masculinity and femininity. Having left the 'innocence' of their childhood worlds they appear to take on the trappings of the grown-ups they mimic and the pervasive role models from popular culture and the media. Other bodies of work look more specifically at older teenage culture with its increasing sexual awareness and, within male hierarchies, the latent aggression which informs, all too often, the identity of young men. This lavishly illustrated book, Michelle Sank's first major publication, is published as a large format portfolio edition.