Teens First Bbc

Teens First Bbc
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Jazz Burkitt | 16:34 UK time, Friday, 4 May 2012

I was born with restricted growth, which means I am the size of an average nine year old, and this affects what I do every day – the world isn’t built for people of my size. I try my best to not let my condition get in my way and am determined to live my life like every other teenager because after all, I am the same - I love fashion and going out with my friends. The only thing about my condition that holds me back is other people’s attitudes – my life would be a lot easier if people were more accepting, because if I am fine with having restricted growth then why shouldn’t other people be?
Since the age of 15 my life has been followed by cameras for a series of BBC Three documentaries. The first documentary called ‘ Small Teen Big World ’ saw me take the huge decision to get in contact with my estranged dad, who I had not seen since I was born. My dad was addicted to drugs and my mum made the heart-breaking decision to bring me up without him in my life. But mum wasn’t alone; she had her parents - my lovely grandparents - to help raise me and without them I wouldn’t be who I am today.
I then had a four part series made about my life called ‘Small Teen Bigger World’ . In this series my dad got in touch and became a huge part of my life – he moved to Wales to be with me and mum. Finally my life and family felt complete. However at the end of the series I found out that my dad had relapsed and had started to take heroin again. My world had been turned completely upside down and my family torn apart.
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When I was first reunited with my dad it felt strangely natural and I was really comfortable around him. I thought it would take longer for me to be willing to let him into my home and my life, but it was actually surprisingly easy to let him in. We got on really well and the best part of our relationship was that we had the same sense of humour – we were always laughing together. Dad also loves animals, so that was a bonus, as I love animals too so we could talk for hours together about them. He was like an 18 year old trapped in a 40 year old man’s body.
Although we laughed and joked there was always a sense that the past was hanging over him and our relationship. Even before I found the drugs there was always a constant reminder that he hadn’t been part of my life for 16 years – it was like I had to tell him my whole life story and explain everything and every person in my life –that was really difficult.
The worst part of finding out that dad was back on drugs was knowing that once again he had chosen them over me. He did it when I was a baby and now he had done it again. It made me feel worthless and like I wasn’t worth choosing. When I was reunited with him I made it clear that although he was welcome back in my life, I only wanted him around if he was clean from drugs. He knew the rules and what would happen if he turned to drugs again, but he still took the risk.
Deciding not to have dad in my life anymore until he gets clean from drugs was definitely the hardest decision I have made, but I know that in the long run it is best for everyone. I didn’t want drugs in my life let alone in my house – imagine if a friend had stayed over and they found them in my room! Having him in my life was just too much of a risk.
This new documentary follows me coping with the devastation of finding out my dad is back on drugs. Mum had become so reliant on his help that she found it difficult to cut him out and I completely understand her choice to continue seeing him but I needed a break and some time to think. My Grandparents were in America visiting my Aunty Shelly so mum and I decided I should visit them to give me chance to think. Whilst I was in America dad started a methadone detox programme, but did it work? You’ll have to watch to find out.
Clip from Small Teen Turns Eighteen:
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The documentary also sees me become an official adult, as I celebrate my eighteenth birthday in style with a fancy dress party. Turning eighteen has been a huge milestone for me; when I look back a year ago I’ve changed so much and I feel like a completely different person. I have grown up inside and out and feel as though I am a stronger and better person. My experience with my dad has taught me to be more wary of people and to not be too trusting.
I have definitely learnt a lot about myself from making these documentaries. I’ve become wiser to the world, feel a lot more confident in myself and have more pride. I actually feel as though I have aged four years in just one year! I am a lot happier than I have ever been and I am ambitious for my future.
Wow loved ur show, loved ur outfit, its good that u have so much confidence we r all Gods creations no 1 is better than non no matter who we r or what we have. God bless u. P.S love ur mom she is so funny she had me in stitches lol..
Hi Jazz. Congratulations on passing a big milestone. You seemed a bit worried about officially becoming an adult. All I can say is that you are a lot more adult than some of the folk that I know and they are much older than you. All the best for the future!
i've really enjoyed watching your documentary series Jazz, many congrats in becoming 18, I wish I was 18 again!!
Hi Jazz , Really enjoyed watching the programmes .Good luck in everything you do.And just wanted to commend you on your feelings towards your Dad.Addiction is a very difficult thing to understand.Look forward to seeing your 21st prog lol x
Jazz - I'd never heard of the programmes that you'd made and only blundered across this on iPlayer but really glad I did. You and the film makers do a great job of showing the world from a different perspective that many people wont have previously appreciated. You're a great lass and deserve every success in your future life and career. Great boots too lol
you are the best jazz, you keep rollin' =) x
thank you for allowing us to cry and laugh with you through your short (no pun intended) life and to have reached eighteen and to have turned out to be such a well adjusted young person is so lovely to see. love all your tv apprearances- stay strong with your beliefs - remember we all have standards life is about holding on to those standards plus alittle bit of compromise carol x
Hi Jazz, I was so happy to see your new programme. You are a bundle of positive energy and it is a joy see you live your life to the fullest. You don't need me to tell you but your mum is FABULOUS!!
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'Disarmingly intimate' photos of women
(Image credit: Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos )
An exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles festival features work by three female photographers who each capture revealing and rarely seen images of women.
When you look at them today, you realise how topical and relevant they are now – Clara Bouveresse
You see the variety of bodies, the flesh, the skin, the hair, the wrinkles, the scars – Clara Bouveresse
Heyman’s images show us, again and again, how rarely women are portrayed as they really are in the media, even now
The US photographer Susan Meiselas first began shooting women who took their clothes off for a living in 1972, when she was in her mid-20s. Travelling around New England, she’d encountered the country fairs that toured rural parts of the northeastern US; many had a ‘girl show’ tent, where women danced in striptease acts. Meiselas was fascinated. Over the course of three summers, she haunted the fairgrounds, befriending dancers and sneaking backstage to capture what their lives were really like . She also recorded hundreds of hours of interviews. In order to blend into the crowd and get the shots she needed, she sometimes dressed like a man.
The book Meiselas eventually produced, Carnival Strippers (1976), has become a classic . Unsparing but sympathetic, both humane and abjectly sad, it showed a world many at the time preferred to ignore: one in which women danced nude for handfuls of dollars, in tawdry, spit-and-sawdust tents erected in one-horse towns. Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing about the work is that Meiselas gives the story a complicating twist. We might expect a sob story – a tale of exploited, objectified women in an exploitative, objectifying industry. Yet Meiselas finds nuance in the biographies of the women who danced, along with remarkable amounts of self-awareness and courage. One says that performing is her path to financial independence; another that the carnival has given her a home when she had nowhere else to go.
“It was a complex story, and I wanted to show it in its complexity,” Meiselas tells BBC Culture. “Not everyone was expecting that.”
Forty-three years after it came out, Carnival Strippers is the centrepiece of an exhibition at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival . Entitled Unretouched Women , it reunites Meiselas’s photo essay with two other books from the same period by American female photographers, both canonical in their way. One is the publication that gives the show its title, The Unretouched Woman (published the same year, 1976), in which Eve Arnold, a pioneering photojournalist, compiled portraits she had taken of women around the world over the previous quarter-century. The third is Abigail Heyman’s Growing Up Female (1974), which describes itself as “about women, and their lives as women, from one feminist’s point of view”.
All three books were their authors’ first: a chance to make their own creative selections and tell the story in their own terms, rather than dealing with the whims of magazine picture editors (usually male). And in their different ways, all three paint a portrait of a tumultuous and convulsive era. Second-wave feminists were campaigning for issues such as abortion rights, workplace equality and an end to sexual harassment; female photographers were challenging the male gaze and questions about how women should be represented. Four decades ago this might be, but walking through the show, you feel you’re not so much stepping into history as peering at a mirror of the present day.
Susan Meiselas, Shortie on the Bally, Barton, Vermont, USA (Credit: Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos)
“Back then, these issues were only just starting to filter into photography,” says the curator, Clara Bouveresse. “But when you look at them today, you realise how topical and relevant they are now.”
When Meiselas and I speak, I ask her for her memories of the mid-70s, and how Carnival Strippers fitted into the debates of the time. She recalls that opting to turn her lens on women who stripped felt like a controversial act: some of her fellow feminists were appalled that she was attempting to document and understand this world rather than condemn it outright.
Susan Meiselas, Tunbridge, Vermont, USA, 1974 (Credit: Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos)
“A lot of women regarded the girl shows as straightforwardly exploitative,” she says. “That was the debate that was going on. But I wanted the book to be part of a dialogue. When one of the women I photographed, Lena, says she found performing a revolutionary experience, that for the first time she'd got men eating out of her hand, who could deny her that feeling? She was acting in defiance against what the world she’d grown up in expected her to be.”
The pictures in Carnival Strippers are disarmingly intimate. We do see the dancers in their carefully crafted public roles, gyrating on makeshift stages in tasseled bikinis or posing for mobs of gawping, baying men. One particularly uncomfortable shot shows a woman in a semi-transparent twin piece perching on the ‘bally box’ outside the tent to drum up business, as if she’s a prize animal on show.
Susan Meiselas, Debbie and Renee, Rockland, Maine, USA, 1972 (Credit: Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos)
But we also glimpse the strippers in private moments: lounging in dressing rooms playing cards; horsing around; swigging beer; collapsed on motel beds. For women who spend their lives on show, these times, captured by Meiselas in grainy, low-light photographs drenched in shadow and atmosphere, must have been particularly precious. In contrast to the bodies they put on display for paying customers, artfully costumed and made up, their real bodies – scarred, sweaty, dirty, sometimes bruised – are finally visible. It is a different and altogether more revealing kind of nakedness.
Bouveresse agrees: “There’s an empowerment of sorts in these pictures: you see the variety of bodies, the flesh, the skin, the hair, the wrinkles, the scars.”
Susan Meiselas, New Girl, Tunbridge, Vermont, USA (Credit: Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos)
Complexity is everywhere you look. A shot of Lena undercuts – or at least complicates – her words about revolution by depicting her after the show, naked and plainly exhausted, pressing a towel to her face in what looks like desperation. Yet elsewhere you sense something more defiant: a sense that these women are attempting to control how we look at them (Meiselas made sure to share her contact sheets with her subjects, often asking them to choose which pictures they liked). For all the tattiness of the fairs, what comes through is the sense of a close backstage community – solidarity, perhaps sisterhood.
Meiselas says, as a women watching these women, she felt it too. “I was like them and not like them,” she says. “That’s why the project was so interesting to me, in a way.”
Eve Arnold’s pictures are revealing in a different sense. Born in Philadelphia in 1912, Arnold shattered nearly every glass ceiling placed in her way: one of the first full members of the prestigious Magnum photo agency in the late 1950s, she managed to make a career as an independent photojournalist in an era when that trade was almost exclusively male (she once observed that “it’s the frustration that drives you” ).
Eve Arnold, Marlene Dietrich at the Recording Studios of Columbia Records, New York, November 1952 (Credit: Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos)
A self-confessed workaholic, she had pictures printed in nearly every major photography publication of the 60s and 70s, among them the Sunday Times Magazine, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life magazine, and became especially renowned for candid shots of celebrities such as Joan Crawford, James Dean, Andy Warhol and Paul Newman. Despite the astonishing range of her work – South African townships in the apartheid era alongside confessional portraits of Marilyn Monroe, whom she shadowed for nearly a decade – she always had an eye for female subjects. In the early 1960s, she shot a pioneering photo essay on birth, and in 1971 made a film, Women Behind the Veil, which stepped inside the closeted world of Arab hammams and harems.
Even so, she waited until her 60s to produce The Unretouched Woman. “It was a way of looking back at her career as a photographer, saying who she was,” says Bouveresse.
Eve Arnold, Actress Joan Crawford, Los Angeles, 1959 (Credit: Eve Arnold / Magnum Photos)
Though some of the images in the book feel a little uninvolved – pitch-perfect, pin-sharp pictures gathered by a globetrotting pro – they nonetheless speak to the democracy of Arnold’s way of looking at the world, especially the women in it. Next to an image of pregnant Zulu women in a labour ward in South Africa there is a melancholy portrait of an elderly woman in a care home in the Cotswolds in England. Yes, here’s Marilyn, probably the most photographed face of her era, but there are also women from Afghanistan, their own features obscured by flowing chadors.
Perhaps the most moving images in the Arles exhibition are those shot by Abigail Heyman. A neglected figure now, Heyman’s attempt to capture female experience in Growing Up Female (subtitle: A Personal Photojournal) is more inward-looking than the other books: a living-out of the mantra that the personal is political. Combining unstaged, stripped-back photographs with handwritten comments, it echoes another canonical feminist text of the era, the bestselling study of female health and sexuality, Our Bodies, Ourselves . Where that book – which included guidance on everything from sexual orientation and gender identity to birth control – encouraged women to take control of their destiny, Heyman’s images show us, again and again, how rarely women are portrayed in the media as they really are, even now.
Abigail Heyman, Beauty Pageant, 1971 (Credit: Courtesy of Abigail Heyman)
As well as the simple beauty of these photographs – shot in a luminous black-and-white that, in Arles, seems to leap off the walls – they’re full of sly irony. One of Heyman’s photographs is a group shot of a beauty pageant in the Deep South of the US: six teenage girls, impeccably preened and perched on folding chairs, looking bored out of their skulls by the exp
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