Irish Girls

Irish Girls is an ongoing photographic project made on film, documenting girls and young women in Ireland aged 8–18, from First Communion to the Debs and the spaces in between. The work moves between portraiture, domestic spaces, celebrations, and everyday moments to examine how identity is formed during adolescence, and how it is shaped by social expectation, visibility, and lived experience.

The project treats photography as a political act of looking. It challenges narrow or idealised representations of young women by focusing instead on specific, lived realities that are often complex and contradictory. Working on film introduces slowness and restraint, allowing time for presence, trust, and sustained attention in contrast to a culture of rapid image circulation and consumption.

At its centre, the work explores how girlhood is shaped by overlapping systems of influence: beauty culture, religion, consumer pressure, sexuality, migration, friendship, and self-image. It considers how young women build and perform identity across both online and offline environments, where visibility is constant and shaped by external expectations and systems of value.

Set in Ireland, the project reflects a society in flux, where inherited religious and cultural structures continue to inform adolescence alongside rapid social change. Within this shifting landscape, Irish Girls is concerned with how representation operates: who is seen, how they are seen, and how certain experiences are amplified or overlooked. In this sense, the work is also political, engaging directly with the conditions that shape visibility and belonging today.

Rather than resolving into a single narrative, Irish Girls holds space for contradiction and complexity, returning again and again to the lived realities of growing up female in contemporary Ireland.