Growing up in Tessenderlo, a small farming town in northern Belgium, Eva Verbeeck’s idea of the US came from a very particular set of images. TV and films were limited at home, so anything that did make it through was devoured intensely. She remembers buying Britney Spears singles on CD, watching Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty tour and waiting for American magazines to arrive through friends and family who knew she wanted them. Pages from Vanity Fair, Vogue and Nylon were plastered across her bedroom. “I would rip it out, and I would paste it all over my wall,” she says. “There was this real idea of escapism.”

The images were formative. Coming of age during the MySpace era, Verbeeck began making her own, photographing herself and her friends while experimenting with self-timers before getting a film camera from her mother. She would develop and keep the prints. “There was always this sense of diary, or photographing to document what was going on in my world,” she says. “Having so much specific visual input as a teenager definitely fuelled what I find interesting now.” She also admits that, at the time, her teenage ambition was to become a Hollywood actress. “I dreamt of that stuff.”

America, then, twinkled with pop stars, prom queens, AOL chatrooms, MTV crib tours, CD towers and big dreams. “I think the US makes this promise to the rest of the world that everything is possible, whether or not that’s true,” Verbeeck says. “I wanted to go where the high schools had lockers and the pop stars were everywhere and so was the glitter. The mythology around it was very attractive to me as a teenage girl.”

At 16, she finally went. Her father was travelling to the US for work and Verbeeck and her brother joined him for a short trip. In New York, she remembers the lights of Times Square, a diner and the sheer volume of everything around her. “It was very different to where I’d grown up, and I found it all so exciting. It screamed so loudly.”

Years later, after moving to the US herself, that childhood fascination became something she wanted to interrogate. She had spent years looking at American girlhood from the outside, and now she could look at it up close. “All of this fascination and escapism as a teenager aside, what does it mean to be a young woman in the US now? What does it mean to be a young woman in this day and age?”

These questions formed America’s Girls, On the Edge of a Dream – a six-year project and book that took place across 28 states. More than 400 girls aged between eight and 18 appear in the pages, encountered by Verbeeck through the places and communities she found while living and travelling across the country. At the centre is the American girl: how she sees herself, how she is seen, and what happens when she is given space to define herself.

As she developed the project, Verbeeck was conscious of how much her own idea of the American girl had been shaped by images consumed in the media, and wanted to move beyond reproducing any of these preconceived notions. “I didn’t see a lot of my own peers with their own voices being documented,” she says. “I saw older girls, or maybe the same girl, continuously portrayed in the same way.” Instead, she worked through schools, sports clubs, youth groups, parents and community organisers, as well as open calls and local networks to source her subjects. “I didn’t want to go around and be like, ‘You’re cool, you’re interesting, I want to photograph you,’” she says. “That would give the project a very different feeling.”

That decision carried through to the photographs themselves. Verbeeck worked with 4x5 and 8x10 large-format film cameras, giving herself just two exposures per person. Beforehand, she would talk to each girl, sometimes asking them to complete questionnaires or record conversations about their lives, hopes and experiences. When it came to the portrait, she left the pose to them. “I told them to stand the way they wanted to stand. If they wanted to look at the camera, they could.” The large-format camera, slow and unfamiliar to a generation accustomed to photographing themselves constantly on iPhones, also changed the dynamic, especially since they couldn’t check the image after each shot. “It became really meditative in a way.”

Each girl was also invited to bring an object with personal significance, meaning that some came empty-handed, while others arrived with pieces from their everyday lives: sports equipment, musical instruments, pets, clothes and other belongings that give the photographs another layer of storytelling. One girl arrived with a cast, three enormous basketball trophies, a stack of books and around 20 medals. Another brought a complete baking outfit because she baked with her father, while another arrived carrying magazines, an echo of the material Verbeeck herself had once covered her bedroom with.

Meanwhile, some of Verbeeck’s strongest memories happened before or after the shutter was snapped. One such memory, she recalls, is of a group of teenage ballet dancers she spotted sitting together, writing about their experiences and their relationships with their bodies. “That moment felt really special to see young women together interacting like that,” she says. “I remember looking at them and thinking, ‘Oh, all of us care about the same thing.’ We all want to be seen and heard.”

That desire runs through the photographs. The girls were not asked to represent a single version of American youth, but rather to come with their own references, interests and also their own contradictions. The outcome is a collection of portraits that can feel specifically American – the uniforms, sports, school culture and visual codes are all there – while remaining recognisable beyond the country that produced them. Verbeeck hopes a photograph might remind someone of themselves, or perhaps a cousin or a friend. “The things I would rip out of magazines and paste on walls were all very similar ideas of what an American girl or woman was like,” she says. “Hopefully this book gives a little bit more nuance to the idea of what girlhood is and what it means for different people in the US.”

America’s Girls, On the Edge of a Dream by Eva Verbeeck is published by GOST and available from 25 September 2026.