Jacqueline Silberbush: What Shod I be!!!?

Jacqueline Silberbush’s “What Shod I be!!!!?” is a uniquely poetic series about the cycle of a young woman’s life. It travels with humor and melancholy from her birth through her childhood into her maturity, love and eros, and culminates in the birth of her own child. “What Shod I be!!!!?’’ addresses many universal female experiences by weaving together images of different children, girls, and young women to create a semi-fictional composite character. The photographs are taken from ten years of Silberbush’s intimate work in nurseries, toy-strewn houses of strung-out families, rave clubs going wild, beds of lovers, acts of sex, and hospital rooms where new souls come bloodily into the world.

Silberbush’s raw, lyrical, and honest photographs are full of humor, sweet and deep reflection, and the intense worry that countless young girls know. As her book’s anxious, reflective, curious, doubting girl works through the intricacies of childhood and adulthood toward the climactic moment when she becomes a mother, she relentlessly asks “What Shod I be!!!!?”. Silberbush offers more questions than answers, of course, watching with wonder and love as the wheel of life turns and turns again.