Below is a fluent English translation of the provided Hebrew text, carefully preserving its nuances and style:

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Iris Hassid Segal’s photographs of her daughter and her friends emerge from a point in time when feminist conclusions had long been internalized and embraced, and when the awareness of contemporary culture’s influences is evident. The mother preserves, remains interested in, and recalls her own tentative exploration of the world during her adolescence. She relies on the girls and fears them, identifying with them and attempting through them to understand something about herself—about her sexuality and her identity—against the backdrop of the era in which she herself matured. After all, the mother is a woman who was once a child and a teenager. Her teenage years belonged to an earlier period in which feminist values had just begun to root themselves within society.

Through her carefully staged photographs depicting familiar situations from the girls’ world, unique moments comprising the process of their identity formation are highlighted. In contrast to an examination of the journey of a single adolescent, Hassid Segal chooses to observe the process as it unfolds collectively. The photographed girls appear together as a group, even when captured individually. By insisting on naming those significant aspects of her daughter’s and her friends’ maturation through her images, the photographer includes both herself and them within the female collective—the unified effort to give voice to what deserves attention, perhaps even more than it has been properly articulated until now.

This female solidarity serves as a fitting alternative to the isolation experienced during adolescence and when gradually coming to terms with the laws of the surrounding world, with one’s inner self, and with one’s ability to effect change and generate meaning from one’s presence. Yet alongside the comfort and alleviation of solitude, Hassid Segal’s photographs also reveal the conflict and difficulty inherent in such collaboration for the young women who partake in it. According to Giligan, the individual feels an innate and necessary need for connection with the other. At the same time, she becomes alienated by that connection, for she perceives it as a threat to her personal identity, just as the patriarchal system has conditioned her to believe. The partnership depicted in the images exists not only among the girls—peers of the same age—but also between women in general, between the young and the photographer-mother, and even among the women and girls who are themselves viewers of the photographs. It is a bond that acknowledges the struggle each faces in finding her voice within a society that forces her to separate her body from her soul, her emotions from her thoughts, and her identity from her relationships.

The images of these girls do not simply look at one another, nor do they turn their gaze toward the observing mother. Instead, they look toward that which remains undefined within the image. In the past, we might have been inclined to claim that the focus was on the male object positioned opposite. Yet these young women are no longer occupied with that. The discourse is internal—a feminine dialogue that seeks to locate the self within a circle of equals, to understand who one is through and in relation to them, and to discover one’s identity within the cultural climate that envelops her, along with the trap in which she finds herself by virtue of her gender. This trap is softened by the solidarity she has created with her friends and, at the same time, is empowered by that very union.

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Shirly Koblentz holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology and works as a therapist at Beit Amiti (“A True Home”), a feminist therapeutic community for survivors of sexual violence.
https://www.erev-rav.com/archives/20036