JoJo, Carol, and Lisa on the corner of Mott and Prince Street, Little Italy, New York

When Magnum photo agency member Susan Meiselas moved to New York’s Little Italy in the mid-1970s, she was noticeably different from the neighborhood’s existing residents: not Italian, single, and an artist. One day a group of neighborhood girls reflected sunlight into Meiselas’s face while she was riding her bicycle. This small rebellious act led to a decades-long friendship and an extended photographic series, The Prince Street Girls. Meiselas documented the girls testing models of womanhood, as in this image of three posing in laced wedge sandals and jean shorts against a backdrop of graffiti and neglected buildings. Years later, the series stands as a testament to a grittier city in which children nevertheless roamed freely and an ethnic culture lost to assimilation and gentrification—told through the particular experience of girls.