From Talking Pictures:
It is this transitionary phase between child and adult that the Israeli photographer Michal Chelbin explores in her images of adolescents in Ukraine, Russia and Spain. Her early work followed acrobats, athletes and itinerant entertainers whose lives centred on physicality, costume and performance. By contrast, her photographs depicted them at rest, introspective. Behind the façade of showmanship her images hinted at a more complex and uncertain sense of being that has become a signature of her portraits. The later bodies of work that we discuss here focus on young wrestlers in Ukraine, prisoners in juvenile detention centres, and teenagers wearing modes of dress and uniform associated with the adult world; forms of costume that tacitly mould each nascent identity to the strictures of conformity.