Israeli Girls

When you think about Israel, you get the missiles and the rubble—the newsreel version, the one that’s designed to be easy to understand and hard to look away from. But there’s another country there, the one where the actual business of being young and restless and vain happens in suburban bedrooms and parking lots, the same as anywhere else. Nobody’s filming that part.

Dafy Hagai photographed it anyway. Her book, Israeli Girls, grew out of a project she started to document the feeling of being that age in that place—which turned out to be mostly about her own childhood. She grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and what ended up in the photographs is basically her memory of herself. She made one rule for her models, some of whom were friends: they had to remind her of who she’d been.

The work doesn’t try to say anything big. It’s just girls, the actual substance of youth in a suburban context, the endless small vanities and boredoms and conspiracies that matter completely while you’re living them and then you forget them almost entirely. That specificity is the whole thing. You could shoot the same photographs in Los Angeles or Berlin or Tel Aviv and they’d register the same way—the light on a face, the confidence of a pose, the reaching for something just out of frame.