Another Girl Another Planet
You know that moment when someone stops thinking about the camera? When the awareness just drops and they’re living again? Valerie Phillips has learned to wait for it. Her new book is full of those moments—girls and women caught in the midst of their actual lives, unguarded, in all the texture and contradiction of living.
The subjects are the kind of people you want to keep looking at. Arvida Byström appears, along with others in that same register—people who move through the world without apology, who dress with intention, who create because not creating would be impossible. Phillips clearly gravitates toward that. She knows what presence looks like.
What works is that the politics never announces itself. These aren’t subjects positioned as symbols. They’re just people being themselves, and the creativity, the refusal, the resistance—it all emerges from that simplicity. Making things. Making noise. Living.
Everyone in the book is completely particular. No one is interchangeable. That’s what stays with you.