Olivia Bee is 22. But all of the photos collected in her first book, Kids in Love, were taken when she was a teenager, mostly between the ages of 15 and 17.
Kids in Love, which gets its Portland release this week at Nationale, has the rare duality of being a mature body of work delivered from a young perspective. Bee’s images (one of which is on this week’s cover) are beautiful, evocative of everything from David Lynch to Francesca Woodman, in highly saturated shades of pink, purple, and red. Though digitally manipulated, the photographs—of herself, boyfriends, friends—don’t look staged, and are instead intimate, naturalistic portraits of actual teenagers as they are, with freckles and messy hair, in floral prints and slouchy flannels, under yellowish lighting, with authentically bad posture and an aura of awkward possibility, glimpsed through an ethereal, fairy tale-like lens.