Deanna Templeton: What She Said

Deanna Templeton: What She Said

Published by MACK

Review by: Timothy LeBlanc

Deanna Templeton’s What She Said is one of the most affecting photobooks to be released so far in 2021. Within its pages are images of both her teenage diary and contemporary young women at the ages she was when she wrote her entries, to create a book that at once speaks to the hyper specificity of her youth and the truth that young women – all of us really – have commonalities in our personal lives.

Deanna Templeton. Image from What She Said (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

This is a project I have waited to be made into book for the last few years. I was lucky enough to come across the roots of this project pairing diary entries with contemporary images almost 5 years ago to the day of this review’s publishing. There was a small selection of these pairs in a show called Women of the New Contemporary curated by Torrey Cook for the Brandstater Gallery at La Sierra University in Riverside, California. They spoke to me then and they speak to me even more in the form of the book.

This is because It is hard to pull any single photo out as a highlight. Of course, I have my favorites – like a near monochromatic image of a woman with snake bite piercing near the beginning, a young woman with an ice cream cone, and the one that ends the book with a woman blowing a bubble with her gum. These are all excellent images that would stand well on their own, but it is the mix of all the books elements which make this a really wonderful and cohesive photobook.

The entries are at times dark, speaking to pain, suffering, and disgust that youth in America, particularly its young women, feel towards themselves. There are pieces about Templeton starving herself. Ones about looking in the mirror finding herself ugly, as cutouts of supermodels look down at her. Then there is the story of when she was raped at a party – it is the only piece in the book, outside of the introduction and acknowledgements, that was written more recently which underscores its lingering and continued importance and impact.

Templeton writes that she, in part, kept all this material to show to her potential children, hoping that sharing the problems she went through would help them get through problems of their own. What She Said itself fulfills this goal starting in its introduction with a photo of the artist in her youth crying, continuing through the troubles recorded in the diaries, and ending with a celebration of her community, filled with photos of her smiling and happy.

In addition to the now thirty-plus year-old writing, which feel timeless, and photos of young women, there are flyers from many of the concerts with which Templeton filled her teenage years. They not only define the time that they are from – one I particularly enjoy is a Meat Puppets with Firehouse at the Roxy flyer with one from the Damned a close second (pictured above) – but they help define an aesthetic and way of life for young people from then on. The book itself pulls its name from a The Smiths song of the same title and is completely fitting, for it too speaks in a melancholic manner that is particularly specific and highly relatable – a feature most often prescribed to music, but one I have always felt is just as inherent to good photography. Everyone either was, or went to school, with young women who relate to those depicted.

There is a diary entry about halfway through the book that reads:

“September 30th, 1986
I don’t know what I want to do. ½ of me wants to be a photographer, take pictures of bands and beautiful things. ½ of me wants to quit…”

I must say that we should all be grateful to the half that won out.

What She Said (2021) by Deanna Templeton, published by MACK is available here and highly recommended.

Deanna Templeton: What She Said