The title of Deanna Templeton’s What She Said is borrowed from a Smiths song, and the phrase points two ways at once: toward the teenagers in the photographs, and back toward the photographer’s own adolescence. Published by MACK in 2021 as a 168-page hardback, the book places recent street portraits beside journal entries Templeton wrote in the mid- to late 1980s.

Those portraits were made on the streets of the United States, Europe, Australia and Russia. The subjects are adolescent women, often punks or others standing at the edge of a crowd; ripped jeans, tights, tattoos and hairstyles mark a transitional moment in their lives. These are not typological specimens. Templeton grew up in a different environment in the 1980s, yet she recognised in these young women the same disappointments and difficulties she met as a girl, and something of the common texture of female adolescence.

Running alongside them are the journal pages and gig flyers of that earlier decade, in which growing up is set down without polish — its antagonism, humour and pathos. Two sets of documents, made decades apart by one person at different ages, are placed in sequence rather than illustration; the alternation carries the book’s thinking. The design keeps faith with that: a debossed linen hardback with tip-in, 19.5 x 24.5 cm, restrained enough that image and text do the work.

For a collector, the interest lies in this structure rather than in any single plate. By holding her own teenage voice beside portraits of strangers, Templeton makes portraiture approximate correspondence, and the book spans two moments of adolescence rather than one. Its claim — that this experience can be recognised across generations — is carried by the arrangement as much as by the looking.