After presenting Sugar for the Pill at the 10th edition of the PhotoVogue Festival: Women by Women, Lexi Hide reflects on the memories, friendships, and moments of rebellion that shaped her photographic world.

School uniforms, bruised knees, bedrooms, fireworks, moments suspended between danger and boredom: Lexi Hide’s Sugar for the Pill is a return to teenage girlhood. The series’ title echoes Simon Scott & Slowdive’s 2017 shoegaze anthem, a song steeped in longing, distance, and the melancholy of looking back. Like the track, Hide’s photographs drift between memory and imagination, where the past lingers with emotional intensity yet remains forever out of reach.

The teenage scenes that emerge in Sugar for the Pill are not purely autobiographical. They are shaped by the cultural imaginary of a generation that came of age during the Tumblr years of 2012–15, marked by the dreamy melancholia of indie music and the reckless youth portrayed in films such as Kids (1995) and Palo Alto (2013). Even the titles of Hide’s photographs are drawn from songs spanning the early 2010s to the present, forming a generational playlist featuring artists such as Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Japanese Breakfast, Phoebe Bridgers, and Ethel Cain.

Yet Sugar for the Pill is not a romanticized portrait of adolescence. Hide explores how memories of youth are constructed through an ongoing exchange between lived experience and cultural references, where the boundaries between reality and fiction begin to blur.

When you began Sugar for the Pill in 2023, adolescence was still a relatively recent chapter of your life. What prompted you to revisit that period through photography?

Adolescence was a time when everything felt incredibly intense. There was a sense of play and spontaneity that I hadn’t experienced in the same way afterwards. Making the images for Sugar for the Pill with my close friends became a way of tapping back into that playful energy. I was twenty-four, so I wasn’t a teenager anymore, but I also didn’t feel completely like an adult, and those years still felt very emotionally close. In some ways, turning towards them was also a way of postponing the idea of adulthood.

How do your memories of adolescence find their way into Sugar for the Pill?

Not every photograph references a specific moment. Some are direct references to things that happened, while others capture only the emotional atmosphere of a particular time or feeling.

The image of a girl sitting in front of fireworks is loosely based on a memory of Guy Fawkes Night. I was hanging out with friends in a parking lot; there were large fireworks, and a piece of burning cinder landed on my chest. It was painful, but also strangely beautiful — a moment of fear, awe, and wonder. In reconstructing the image, I tried to tap into that same emotional intensity.

When you construct a photograph, are you trying to recover a feeling, a memory, or a former version of yourself?

It’s mostly about recovering a feeling. The photograph featuring the school uniform has a very personal story attached to it. The uniform belonged to an Anglican school I attended, which I experienced as extremely controlling. I spent those years actively antagonising the institution in every way I could. I was constantly causing trouble until I was eventually expelled. Using the uniform in the photograph became a way of continuing that rebellion and creating trouble for them once again.

The staged worlds of Sugar for the Pill are built around friendship, performance, and play. Were those elements already present when you first started taking photographs?

When my friends and I were teenagers, we would spend entire days creating photoshoots and making images together. It was less about photography and more about playing with identities, performing different versions of ourselves. At first, it was a bit intimidating, but I slowly discovered that I enjoyed being behind the camera — directing, arranging, and shaping a scene. Being with my friends allowed me to be a bit bossy, too, and really control every detail of the scene. Those early moments taught me the confidence and sense of control that I still bring into my practice today.

Your work creates a strong sense of nostalgia while also exposing it as a construction. What interests you about this tension?

Photography is inherently nostalgic because every image immediately belongs to the past. But I don’t want to use nostalgia as an aesthetic shortcut. In my work, nostalgia is the subject rather than the approach. I intentionally include contemporary objects and details that reveal that these images could not have existed during my actual teenage years. The nostalgia itself is staged. The photographs create a false sense of remembering, and that contradiction is central to the work.

Adolescence often appears romanticised in popular culture. How do you navigate the tension between the beauty of those memories and their more difficult or uncomfortable aspects?

All memory is unreliable. You never really know what you can trust. Some memories from that time are beautiful, and some are very painful. Even the good ones often involve behaviour that now seems extreme. We were reckless with ourselves and with each other. There was a cruelty and carelessness that came with being young and not understanding the consequences of your actions. Adolescence wasn’t only beautiful — it was chaotic, dramatic, and sometimes destructive.

Images by Lexi Hide