Gathers the earliest photographs of Sherrie Nickol, made in the late 1970s and largely unseen until now.
Sherrie Nickol: Chrysalis brings together, for the first time, the earliest photographs of Sherrie Nickol, work made in the late 1970s that has remained largely unseen for nearly half a century. Shot on film in natural light, the book offers a sustained study of young women, photographed primarily in Cincinnati, where Nickol was a college student, capturing her subjects in bedrooms, hallways, staircases, and window light, in states of reverie, intimacy, and quiet self-possession. Alongside these portraits, Nickol turns her lens on the streets, landscapes, and communities of the American South where she grew up, documenting Osceola, Arkansas, the Mississippi Delta, and New Orleans.
The title speaks to everything the book contains: a protected space of becoming, of identity not yet fixed, of transition held gently in suspension. Shot entirely on film and in natural light, with the characteristic black borders that connect Nickol to an earlier generation of photographers, these pictures ask what it means to be young and female at a particular moment in American life.
