“I grapple with Richard Kern’s work,” she said, adding that some of her friends have had positive experiences shooting with him. “Some of that work lacks emotion,” she continued. “It’s sterile and calculated. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything behind their eyes. I’m very curious about what the person in front of the camera has to say.”
Ms. Sherbert noted how that generation of images looked in the rear view: “Is it an aesthetic? Or is it a power relationship between the person behind that camera and in front of the camera?”
Last June, in need of a refresh, Ms. Maher moved to Los Angeles, falling in with a circle of young women in the entertainment world. Opportunities for commercial work soon followed. She recently shot Ms. Sennott for a Calvin Klein campaign, and Emma Chamberlain for Aritzia. She shoots for Sofia Wine, Sofia Coppola’s wine brand. (“I love Sofia Coppola, and the fact that she says that she loves my pictures makes you want to die, or like DMs me, I’m like, I can die now.”)
The shoe designer Nicole Saldaña recently hired Ms. Maher to photograph a digital campaign. Ms. Saldaña wanted the imagery to feel like “a girl was sharing her favorite style in her bedroom,” she said. “I did give her carte blanche to take images that felt organic.” The photos, coy but focused, felt like a natural extension of the “Girls in Bed” series.
On a snowy Monday night in late February, Ms. Maher celebrated the release of “Girls in Bed” with an installation and party at Lubov, a gallery in New York’s Chinatown. In the main room, people swilled beers and looked at some of the photos from the book, which had been printed and framed. But Ms. Maher also had the images made into slides and a projector was displaying them, huge size, on a wall in a back room.
Taken in this way, some patterns emerged. Many of the subjects stretched and sprawled beyond the frame, suggesting the scope of their corporeal ambition and an eagerness to connect to the outside world. It was also clear that the bed as a space meant something different to each subject. For some it was a retreat, for some a playpen. The photos allude to friskiness but don’t rely on it for their conversational power.
