The teenage scenes that emerge in Sugar for the Pill are not purely autobiographical. They are shaped by the cultural imaginary of a generation that came of age during the Tumblr years of 2012–15, marked by the dreamy melancholia of indie music and the reckless youth portrayed in films such as Kids (1995) and Palo Alto (2013). Even the titles of Hide’s photographs are drawn from songs spanning the early 2010s to the present, forming a generational playlist featuring artists such as Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Japanese Breakfast, Phoebe Bridgers, and Ethel Cain.
Yet Sugar for the Pill is not a romanticized portrait of adolescence. Hide explores how memories of youth are constructed through an ongoing exchange between lived experience and cultural references, where the boundaries between reality and fiction begin to blur.
When you began Sugar for the Pill in 2023, adolescence was still a relatively recent chapter of your life. What prompted you to revisit that period through photography?
Adolescence was a time when everything felt incredibly intense. There was a sense of play and spontaneity that I hadn’t experienced in the same way afterwards. Making the images for Sugar for the Pill with my close friends became a way of tapping back into that playful energy. 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. In some ways, turning towards them was also a way of postponing the idea of adulthood.
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