Eva Verbeeck began photographing this project out of a distance she has since closed. Raised in a small Belgian farming town in the 1990s, she knew American girlhood first as an image — assembled from magazines, films, music videos, and pop culture — and only later as a country she would live in and travel across. America’s Girls, On the Edge of a Dream is the result: six years of work in twenty-eight states, made entirely on analogue film, with more than four hundred girls between the ages of eight and eighteen. The photographs were produced on large-format cameras, a pace that gave the sessions room for conversation and trust.
Verbeeck found her subjects through open calls, community events, schools, youth groups, and local organisers, and the project grew through those encounters rather than a fixed itinerary. Each girl was invited, but not required, to bring an object of personal significance — a belonging, a piece of sports equipment, an instrument, a pet — or to be photographed without one. The photographs consider identity, femininity, power, and the pull of media and cultural mythology on contemporary girlhood, and they let the girls speak to what they care about rather than serving as illustrations of a thesis.
The book sits between documentary and a painterly visual language. Verbeeck’s portraits resist simplification; they are intimate without being sentimental, and they hold the difference between the myth of the American teenager and the actual lives she encountered. The scale of the undertaking is part of the point — a long project, geographically broad, developed over years of return visits and conversation rather than a single trip.
GOST Books issues the book in hardback clothbound at 290 × 350 mm, with 104 pages and 54 images printed in four colours — a format that gives the large-format negatives room. Published in 2026, it presents a sustained body of work by a photographer whose practice centres on adolescence and how individuals come to understand themselves within larger cultural frameworks.
