Photo Booth Abigail Heyman’s Groundbreaking Images of Women’s Lives By Naomi Fry November 1, 2019 “Houma Teenage Beauty Contest,” 1971. Photographs by Abigail Heyman In a two-page spread featured early on in “ Growing up Female ,” a photography book by Abigail Heyman, from 1974, two black-and-white pictures are laid out side by side. The left-hand photo shows a reflection of a little girl, from the shoulders up, gazing at herself in a bathroom mirror. The child, who is perhaps four or five, with dark, wide-set eyes and a pixie haircut, is separated from her likeness by a counter, whose white-tiled expanse is littered with a variety of beauty products: perfume bottles, creams, and soaps. These quotidian markers of feminine routine are accompanied by an element of fantasy; gazing at herself, the little girl stretches a slinky into a makeshift tiara atop her head. Seemingly mesmerized by her own image, she is captured at the innoce...
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