Graduation Dresses

"Clothing is not seen as simply reflecting given aspects of the self but, through its particular material propensities, is co-constutive of facets such as identity, sexuality and social role."
Sophie Woodward, Clothing as Material Culture, 2005.

Graduation Dresses' is an ongoing project consisting of a series of photographs I take of young women, in Banja Luka (Bosnia & Herzegovina), who have completed recently their high school education. All of them have had a dress made by my mother (for their graduation ball), and nearly all the dresses are based on an image of a celebrity or a model wearing a famous designer dress.
I photograph them in their homes and through this engagement with their personal and intimate spaces capture that transitional journey from adolescence to womanhood, revealing both their maturity and vulnerability.

Being the same age when I left Bosnia as the graduate girls I photograph, I am drawn to document that point in their lives. The move to Britain for me happened quite abruptly with a backdrop of the civil war hence my generation is the only one not to have had the graduation ball. Perhaps it is this 'loss' that makes me curious as to how these young women's identities are shaped, and what are their hopes and fears in the face of the future, which seems so unstable in the current political and economic climate (but, then isn't the future always unstable?). All of the graduate girls I have photographed were born in the late eighties and were children when the civil war started in what was Yugoslavia. That meant that they grew up during the war and their adolescent years have been shaped by the equally transitional and unstable post-war period.

Their personal spaces, particularly their rooms bear traces of their childhood: teddy bears and dolls, cartoon characters on the bedding and Barbie prints on the curtains. These objects, referred to as 'transitional objects' by the psychoanalyst Winnicott allude to the transitional nature of adolescence - "transitional object: something your child may be clutching on to just now, perhaps a bit of cloth that once belonged to the cot-cover, or was a blanket or mother's hair-ribbon...or a teddy-bear essential for security and happiness and symbolic of an ever-available mother or mother-element (or father-element)" (Winnicott, 'Home is where we start from', 1986, p.50, p.265)

The dresses could be seen as transitional objects themselves, connecting the body with the environment, serving as an intermediary between the inner and the outer. What role do the graduation dresses play? As they are prepared for a very important event, that of 'matura - graduation' (matura word in Bosnia and Herzegovina also means 'an exam of maturity') we could see these dresses as statements of maturity, a form of public entrance into the state of womanhood.

The performance is a key part of the preparation as well as presentation for everyone who gathers to watch the young women in the town square. This moment of public performance is an important part of the ceremony; hence I have asked each of the girls I photographed to give me a photo taken of them on the actual evening (will be posting here soon). And as much as the graduation ceremony is an old ritual, there is something distinctly new in the glamour and the glitz of the post war ceremony, which has come to resemble the Hollywood style film premiers and Oscar ceremonies.

There is a tangible tension in the photographs between the ordinariness of the domestic spaces and the glamour exuded by the dresses as between the graduating girls' maturity and vulnerability. The girl's gaze is firmly on the camera, caught between the remains of the past and the possibilities of the future. What is in this complex gaze? Why is this search for the graduate dresses so focused on the images of models and celebrities in the glossy fashion and gossip magazines?

'Graduation Dresses' grew out of a Necessary Journeys travel bursary I was awarded by the Arts Council England and the British Film Institute in 2005. I spent a month recording a working life at my mother's one bedroom flat, where she runs a made to measure tailoring business. The whole body of work is titled 'Radionica - Work Shop' and to read more about it please click here and to see Necessary Journeys showcase please visit www.artscouncil.org.uk/nj/showcase.shtml

To read an excerpt from an interview by Rohini Malik Okon please click HERE.

Necessary Journeys Artists' Blog (Dinu Li, Trevor Woolery, Fernando Arias, Oreet Ashery, Ralph Hoyte, Jiva Parthipan & Margareta Kern) www.necessaryjourney.blogspot.com

This body of work has been made as part of an internationaI travel bursary received from the Arts Council England and the British Film Institute. This formed a part of the 'Necessary Journeys' initiative, which culminated in a two day symposia at the Tate Modern, on the 11th and 12th November 2005.

Necessary Journeys is a decibel and the Visual Arts department of Arts Council England programme of arts initiatives that takes its cue from the British Film Institute's Black World project and seeks to explore the diverse ways in which the arts connect with film. The title is borrowed from an article by Caryl Phillips, in The Guardian.