The big picture: teenage girls at play in east London

Untitled, from the series Shopna, 2002. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/Courtesy of Mack

Suki Dhanda, whose work has been a brilliant feature of the Observer for 25 years, took this photograph of teenage girls in Whitechapel, east London, in 2002. It is included in a new book, Shining Lights, celebrating the work of Black female photographers in Britain. The picture was originally part of a series commissioned by the British Council focusing on ideas of community. Dhanda had already been working on a project with Bengali girls and used the commission to extend that work. The girls in the picture reminded her, she says, of the competing pressures she’d experienced growing up in Slough, with Indian heritage, to conform to both the expectations of her family, and the desire to be a British teenager no different from any other.

“I was looking at the life of this one girl in particular,” she says, “and how she developed her identity. She would wear Nike trainers and jeans, but also the hijab. I was interested in how that seemed to give her a confidence to go out with her friends and help her feel safe.” This was in the months after 9/11, when there was a focus on the integration of Muslim communities in Britain; these girls, it seemed, playing pool, while gesturing toward the values of their parents, were feeling their own way toward what that meant.

Dhanda herself had long since worked out that dilemma. Her parents couldn’t really conceive of a career in arts or media, so she took herself off to Plymouth to study photography before starting work in London in the 1990s. She found the sense of belonging and freedom in the city that she had been looking for. And did her parents acknowledge that this was a career after all? “I think they did when I did a portrait of Tony Blair, when he was prime minister,” she says, with a laugh. “That made it seem like a proper job.”