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Real Family Photos: A Mother Photographs Her Seven Children’s Chaotic Coming Of Age

Peggy Nolan butted into her children's lives and photographed when she saw

“These photographs are mostly not posed: I just butted into my kids’ personal business and, a lot of times, they weren’t that happy about it. I went to three or four Lollapalooza concerts with my camera when they were there – I busted into things not to supervise them but to take pictures. But I promised them they’d appreciate it eventually, and now they do.

– Peggy Nolan

 

Teenagers

 

Peggy Nolan was living with her seven children – four sons and three daughters, all born between 1967 and 1982 – not far from Miami in southern Florida in the early 1980s when to mark her 40th birthday, her father gave her a camera. The result is a joyous, raucous and frenetic journey through her children’s lives. A story of puberty, boredom, mess and everything that matters.

Collated into the book Juggling is Easy, Nolan’s photographs speak of coming of age: teenage parties, BMX bikes, skate ramps, boyfriends, girlfriends, snogging, cartwheels, Playboy mags, and all the fun, noise, pain and confusion of what is to grow up. These aren’t those contrived awkward family photos of teens staring bleakly from albums and dining room walls. Nolan shows us childhood in the wild.

“I like teenagers a lot,” Nolan told Vogue. “They think they can live forever. The angst, the anger, the excitement, the future, the risk-taking… All of that, I see it. They don’t hide it.”

 

Teenagers

 

“I didn’t think about myself as a photographer or artist for many years, I didn’t think about the finished product or getting attention – this was a private family pleasure,” she told AnOther mag.

“I was a little bit worried about it, but it all worked out! So that’s my laissez-faire parenting style; it’s a little bit loose. If you consult some of my kids, they’ll probably tell you one or two things they’re pissed off about. My eldest son wrote for some essay I wasn’t supposed to read: ‘My mother is too cool. Sometimes it’s embarrassing.’”

 

teenagers

 

“The reason I like to photograph kids is that they don’t hold back. Grown-ups don’t touch each other as much, they don’t sit with their legs open on a chair, they don’t eat their hair. They get rid of all those habits and become ‘civilised’

– Peggy Nolan

 

 

“The most interesting age to photograph was probably when they became sexually interested. It added a tension to life that was really fun to see. I’m very interested in boredom, too. I myself am never bored, but there’s a certain teenage ennui and it makes really interesting pictures.

 

teenagers

 

“My approach to making the pictures was always totally instinctive. There was so much chaos and I relied on my instincts – I still do. The more you can use your senses, the more genuine the finished product will be. I don’t think about the past very much; I live in the moment. The pictures are my work now, and they’re very different to the actual lives of my children. When I was making the pictures, when I look at them now, I think of my children as objects. I don’t have a sentimental attachment to them in the work, it’s more of an aesthetic attachment. That sounds a bit cold but ultimately, if you’re going to make a piece of art, you have to distance yourself from what’s in the picture – it’s about that, of course, but the whole picture, with all its components, has to be considered for it to really work.”

Juggling is Easy by Peggy Nolan in published by TBW Books.

 

teenagers

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