Possibility, verve and glamour fizz through Alice Mann’s gorgeous photographs of South Africa’s high school leavers, collated in a new book, The Night is Young. Shot between 2018 and 2023 at various institutions’ matriculation balls, teenagers strut on red carpets, recline on chaises longues, flinging off high heels to cut loose on the dancefloor.
Cinematically embodying prom’s youthful exuberance and aspiration, all swishing gowns and sleek tuxes, Mann’s subjects are about to begin their adult lives. But coming of age has a double meaning. In an essay in the book, Catherine E Mckinley notes that the portraits were taken three decades after the end of apartheid, and their subjects’ “young lives represent barely more than half of that tremendous struggle to grow”.
Alice Mann, The Night Is Young is published by Idea
