Betsy Schneider - To Be Thirteen

In 2011, Arizona-based photographer Betsy Schneider, herself the mother of a 13-year-old daughter, embarked on a project to explore the experience of being 13.

Traveling around the United States, the Guggenheim grant recipient spent 2012 chronicling 250 13 year olds, creating still portraits and video documentation of each. The resulting body of work creates a rich collective portrait of a group of Americans whose lives began at the turn of the millennium and who are coming of age now.

To Be Thirteen depicts all 250 portraits with brief quotations from the extended video interviews and an interview by Center for Creative Photography Chief Curator Rebecca Senf with Schneider, unpacking details about the artist’s process, insights about the project and how it changed her, as well as longer excerpts from the subjects. This publication captures and conveys the experience of meeting with the artist and looking through a stack of prints with her, and will complement an exhibition of the project debuting at the Phoenix Art Museum in the spring of 2018.