Sugar for the pill: lexi hide unearths the raw nerve of teenage rebellion
Lexi Hide’s latest photographic series, ‘Sugar for the Pill,’ isn’t a nostalgic trip. It’s a deliberate excavation of adolescent intensity – a refusal to sanitize the messy, often painful, beauty of growing up.
A return to the static of the tumblr years
The images, steeped in a shoegaze aesthetic reminiscent of Simon Scott & Slowdive’s ‘Sugar for the Pill,’ drift between memory and a carefully constructed fantasy. Hide masterfully blends echoes of the early 2010s – the dreamy melancholy of indie music, the reckless abandon of films like Kids and Palo Alto – with a potent, intensely personal vision.
But beneath the surface of carefully curated aesthetics lies a startling honesty. Hide isn’t romanticizing adolescence; she’s dissecting its contradictions, exposing the volatility and the undercurrents of rebellion.
The ghosts of guy fawkes night
The series’ genesis, triggered by a personal reckoning, found Hide revisiting a formative period through the lens of photography. “It was about tapping back into that playful energy,” she explains. “I was twenty-four, so I wasn’t a teenager anymore, but I also didn’t feel completely like an adult, and those years still felt very emotionally close.”
‘Sugar for the Pill’ isn’t merely autobiographical; it’s a conversation with a generation. The song titles – Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Japanese Breakfast, Phoebe Bridgers, Ethel Cain – aren’t just aesthetic nods; they’re sonic signposts, charting a generational landscape of feeling.
Beyond the photograph
Hide’s process isn’t about recreating specific moments. “Some are direct references to things that happened,” she notes, “while others capture only the emotional atmosphere of a particular time or feeling.” The image of a girl engulfed in fireworks, for example, stems from a visceral memory of Guy Fawkes Night – a moment of startling beauty amidst a painful burn. “I tried to tap into that same emotional intensity,” Hide confesses. It’s a deliberate layering, a construction of feeling rather than a simple recollection.
Reclaiming control
The uniforms, sourced from an Anglican school where Hide instigated a relentless campaign of defiance, become potent symbols of rebellion. “Using the uniform became a way of continuing that rebellion and creating trouble for them once again,” she states. The staged worlds – built around friendship, performance, and play – weren’t a spontaneous development; they were cultivated through years of teenage experimentation. “At first, it was a bit intimidating, but I slowly discovered that I enjoyed being behind the camera – directing, arranging, and shaping a scene,” Hide reveals. “Being with my friends allowed me to be a bit bossy, too, and really control every detail of the scene.”
The imperfect archive
What truly sets ‘Sugar for the Pill’ apart is its awareness of memory’s inherent unreliability. “Photography is inherently nostalgic because every image immediately belongs to the past,” Hide argues. “But I don’t want to use nostalgia as an aesthetic shortcut. In my work, nostalgia is the subject rather than the approach.” The deliberate inclusion of contemporary objects – a subtle but crucial detail – underscores the staged nature of the recollections. “The photographs create a false sense of remembering, and that contradiction is central to the work.”
A reckoning with chaos
Adolescence, Hide insists, was rarely idyllic. “All memory is unreliable. You never really know what you can trust. Some memories from that time are beautiful, and some are very painful. Even the good ones often involve behaviour that now seems extreme.” The series doesn’t shy away from the cruelty and carelessness that often accompany youth – a reminder that beauty and chaos can exist in unsettling harmony. Ultimately, ‘Sugar for the Pill’ is a bracingly honest portrait of a formative period, stripped of sentimentality and fueled by a profound understanding of the human condition.”n