The White Sky

In her early twenties, the American photographer Mimi Plumb looked back to her Californian childhood to make a series of photographs about suburban youth. The resulting photographs collected in her new book “The White Sky’ builds a world in which an unknown trauma hangs heavy in the air, and children rule the roost.

Selected by Alec Soth as his favorite photo book of the year!

“At 13 we wore faded jeans, torn at the knees, tight white t-shirts, long straight hair parted down the middle. We wandered through the suburban landscape hiding in corners, smoking cigarettes, looking for stuff to do."

“Throughout my childhood years, growing up beneath the shadow of Mt. Diablo in the California suburb of Walnut Creek, I watched the rolling hills and valleys mushroom with tract homes and strip malls, and to me and my teenage friends, they were the blandest, saddest homes in the world.The starkness of the landscape hurt my eyes. The low brown hills coated with dry grass, scratching my ankles, fox tails caught in my socks. I was always looking for a place to hide from the bright, white sky. The raw dirt yards and treeless streets, model homes expanding exponentially, with imperceptible variation.” - Mimi Plumb