“Growing up as a girl in Delhi, you’re hyper-aware of your position in society,” says Noor Kaur Randhawa. Delhi is notoriously unsafe for women; a recent survey by the UN found that 95% of women and girls feel unsafe in the city’s public spaces. “Even simple things, like going out at night, requires planning. We’d have to travel in groups for safety, and that constant awareness shaped my experience of growing up.”
Despite these constraints, Randhawa and her friends refused to let fear dictate their lives. “We wanted to resist that narrative,” she says. “This project captures how we found our agency, despite the limitations imposed on us.” Created over three years, Rite of Passage documents the 25-year-old photographer and her friendship group as they navigate girlhood, identity, and self-discovery. Most of the shots are spontaneous, but some are staged from collective memories—their first tattoos, cramming for exams, exploring their sexuality.
Randhawa first got into photography as a teenager, inspired by Olivia Bee and her 2016 book, Kids in Love. “Olivia was so young when she made those pictures, and I was also young when I first saw them. It felt rare to see that perspective, and it really spoke to me,” she says.
Although she was drawn to photography, she ended up studying communications at college. “Where I’m from, being an artist isn’t really seen as a practical career,” she explains. “But throughout that period I kept coming back to photography.” Eventually, she landed an internship with Bharat Sikka, and this shifted her perspective. “It was an incredible place to be… Being around his collection of photobooks had a huge impact on me,” she says.
Among those books was Girl Pictures by Justine Kurland. “She inspired me to document my own world—my friends, my environment,” says Randhawa. “When I started this work, I made a list of emotions I wanted to capture—especially ones that were raw or confrontational.” For example, an image of a face, cropped and confrontational, with a pimple on the precipice of popping. “It’s almost grotesque… I wanted to show the visceral reality of growing up,” she says. “Even the picture of the vibrator speaks to how we navigated a conservative culture, exploring our sexuality as a form of self-discovery. It was about confronting these experiences head-on rather than hiding them.”
Randhawa captures the many realities of girlhood, but is Rite of Passage specific to the experience of being a girl in Delhi? “I can’t speak for every girl in Delhi, because our experiences are so varied,” she reflects. “Some aspects might not resonate with people who grew up in more liberal societies, but the themes of friendship, identity, and self-discovery are universal.”
Decorating your bedroom with doodles and stickers, smoking cigarettes out of a kitchen window, getting a tattoo your parents don’t approve of—these are all familiar rites of passage for girls everywhere. Through her lens, Randhawa captures how it feels to grow up as a girl, the laughter, messiness, confusion, and above all the friendships, bonded by memories that will last a lifetime.
