Petra Collins Wasn’t Asking Permission

America has always been two countries running on the same landmass—the one that arrests soldiers because a child’s bikini photo turned up in a family album, and the one that stays up all night making art that the first country will spend years trying to suppress. The tension between them is basically the engine of American culture. The repression generates the transgression; the transgression feeds the repression. Around and around.

Petra Collins and Laura-Lynn Petrick operate squarely in the second country—or sometimes Canada, which participates on a visitor basis. They shoot together under the name Fatale Femmes, and the work is exactly what the name promises: tits, tangled forests, red-framed glasses, thong straps, inverted crosses, dirt. Not shock for its own sake—more like a sustained refusal to clean anything up for the people who would prefer it clean.

Collins in particular has a knack for photographing youth without either romanticizing or condemning it—just the bodies and the boredom and the mess of it, the sense that something is always slightly off or slightly too much. Petrick’s work has a similar rawness, a preference for the unguarded moment over the posed one. Together they make images that feel like memory rather than documentation—the kind that wouldn’t survive a Facebook upload.

Beyond the cameras, they were writing for Rebelle Zine and the Garbage Museum blog, contributing to whatever passed for the interesting corner of the internet before everything got curated to death.

I’m always helplessly drawn to people who make things without asking permission first. Collins and Petrick clearly didn’t write to anyone for approval. That’s most of what makes the work worth looking at—and, honestly, most of what makes the people worth following.