Sherrie Nickol - Chrysalis

Documenting late 1970s American Womanhood: The book captures what it felt like to be young and female in America in the late 1970s

Chrysalis gathers the earliest photographs of Sherrie Nickol, made in the late 1970s and largely unseen until now. Shot on film in natural light, the work centers on young women captured in intimate, unguarded moments, alongside portraits of the American South where Nickol grew up.

Chrysalis (Hirmer) 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. At its heart, the book is 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.