After completing her graduate degree at Yale University in 2016, O’Leary found herself thinking about those pictures again, “about the impact a photograph can have and the idea of the camera being weaponised”. She was drawn back to State College, where she planned to make portraits of women returning home at night from parties. One evening, she set up on campus with the help of several students and “as I was describing the kind of women I was looking for, I realised I sounded like a predator,” she admits. She was unnerved and immediately stopped taking pictures for a time. “This was just one of the ethical crises in portraiture that ultimately led to [my series] Spitting Image, this sense that the power dynamic was really off and I needed to figure it out.” A folder of selfies she had made as a young teenager in Ireland, emailed to O’Leary by her father around this same time, also informed the project. “I saw how I was using photography to imagine how other people saw me, and then constructing my identity – or who I wanted to be – through the pictures. That was when I started thinking about how teenagers use cameras as mirrors.” With Spitting Image, she explains, “I wanted to see the town’s impact on that young adolescent group, to know if it was something I could see. But it was also an opportunity to figure out how to make a portrait where the person photographed had more control over the final image.” After presenting her work and conceptual interests to the art classes at her former high school, O’Leary invited young women students, with parental permission, to have their portraits made. She was taken aback by how many accepted.
In the barn behind her parents’ home, O’Leary built a giant, light-tight tent for her 8X10 camera. Clamped at the far end to a two-way mirror, the lens could see the sitter, but the sitter could only see their reflection. The large format camera enabled her to capture the subtleties of each girl’s face. “I set up an extension for the camera to photograph really close up. The shallow depth-of-field enabled me to focus on expression and render an extreme amount of detail.” She continues, “I also think there’s an intimacy to that perspective, the kind of intimacy you have when looking at yourself in the mirror.” O’Leary articulates the project’s goal succinctly: “When a girl sat down and looked at the mirror, I wanted her to decide how she wanted to look.”
By neither guiding nor dictating when the exposure would be made, O’Leary empowered each subject to control their representation. “Their sign to me that they were ready was to stop moving. Only then would I focus the camera, put the film in, and make the picture.” Presented from the shoulders up, the resulting portraits are arresting. The subjects evoke unease, curiosity, self-assuredness, and everything in between through the quality of their gazes, the posturing of their heads, and the expressions on their faces. Clothing, accessories, hair and makeup vary dramatically, but what connects them all is the shared self-consciousness as they confront their reflections and struggle with how they should present themselves. Enveloped in her blonde, wavy mane, one pale-faced girl – her forehead, cheeks and chin rosed by adolescent blemishes – stares straight into the camera. Her shimmering blue eyes are magnetising. Though she focuses on the lens, her expression conveys a distance, a looking-through rather than a looking-at. Asked why the backgrounds are blue, O’Leary replies: “I was obsessed with lapis lazuli and how it was originally a signifier of value in paintings because the pigment was so expensive. I was thinking specifically about the power and importance placed on images of women.” Ultimately, O’Leary photographed over 100 female adolescents between the ages of 11 and 14: “It was a vulnerable thing for each girl to do and I felt grateful that I was allowed to witness it.”