In one image we see Boli crashed out in a club, her legs splayed, her knickers showing, her head in the lap of a woman holding a sign over her eyes that says ‘Reservado’. Then Boli’s in the shower, she’s kissing her girlfriend, she’s crashed on her bed. Like something out of an early Ryan McGinley shoot, Boli runs naked down a rural path, she lies sprawled against a patch of unkempt scrub and she poses topless with a friend wearing leopard skin pants.
There are also American references in there; a US flag, a Breakfast Club poster and a woman with her pubic three-day-growth shaped into an outline of Texas, suggestions that maybe this is also an indirect autobiography.
“It’s a coming of age story,” says Zucker. “The women in these pictures are reflections of myself and our dealings with each other take us to places where radical things can happen. It’s interesting how the self performs in photography. It’s not just a direct documentary. There is a lot of quotation happening here and that is a reflection of my own narrative. There is a lot of referencing of other photographers, like Daido Moriyama and Larry Clark. I work a lot with diptychs, so the one with the gun pointing at my friend Lorena is an obvious reference to Clark’s Tulsa.”
Zucker says Girlfriend is about female agency in a largely male world – the documentary world — and that her work is about women writing their own stories through the hedonism, chaos and freedom of the dark side of recession-era Spain, a side that may not exist for too much longer.
First published in the November 2013 issue. You can buy the issue here.
