The Girl Gang Theory of Cities

London makes Berlin feel like a market town with a mythology problem. I know that’s not what you’re supposed to say—Berlin has its own gravity, the club that’s been running since the Wall came down, the art school dropout who showed up for a month and stayed a decade. But London is a different scale of city. The streets there carry weight that Berlin is still trying to accumulate.

Photographer James Beddoes spent an afternoon with Graziella Pini and Emily J Odonnell for Sticks & Stones. Graziella had come to London for a week to visit Emily; Beddoes happened to be around, so he invited them to hang out and put it on film. We listened to music, danced around, and suddenly I was a member of the coolest girl gang in London, he said. That’s the kind of afternoon that sounds better than it photographs, and then somehow photographs perfectly.

What comes through in the images isn’t the city exactly—it’s the specific texture of being young and completely at ease in it. Breathing exhaust fumes on a street corner and not caring. The afternoon light landing exactly right. Graziella and Emily look like they belong to London in the way that only people visiting it ever really do.