These intimate photographs of young women were hidden away for almost half a century

You can get to a long way in life without recognising what you were doing all along. Photographer Sherrie Nickol found her moment in a long-forgotten archive of portraits and images of the American South. Nickol discovered more than 300 images when she returned to her archive that had barely been seen since she took them. Looking at the photographs from the late 1970s, she recognised the intuitive approach to photography that guides her today, was evident back then.

Intimate beginnings

Intimate portraits of young women and documentary photographs of the American South are brought together in a new book, Chrysalis, published by Hirmer Verlag. The images made when Nickol was still finding her path as a photographer, offer a compelling glimpse of a photographer discovering how they wanted to interpret the world. When she was 20 years old, Nickol bought her first camera, to take off on a summer trip. That experience with a 35mm Canon single-lens reflex was transformative. She returned to University and enrolled in a basic photography course. ‘Through the act of photography I could combine my deep interests in history, creative writing, and political science, and create visual stories about the people around me,’ she says.

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