Margaret M. De Lange

Margaret M. De Lange's bleary, phantasmagorical photographs of her daughters Cathrin and Jannicke - running feral, dressed in feathers, silk, and lace

De Lange says that she's got used to, and even welcomes, outraged responses to her work: it's indifference she most despises: "You don't have to like my pictures, but it's important for me that you can dislike them. I have people who don't like my pictures at all, but that's okay, so long as it touches them in some way." She refuses to explain or decode the pictures' layers of meaning, and wants the viewer instead to interpret them from their own 'experiences, dreams and feelings.'

The whole project was shot over 15 years, so the black-and-white negative De Lange has used as stock is the only constant: locations, her daughters' development, her work and the cameras have, of course, all changed a lot over the years.

De Lange had no inkling that photographing her daughters - who are now aged 19 and 21 - would dominate her work, but she was already 27 and a mother of two when she decided she needed a creative outlet. She discovered photography after ditching drawing for being too fiddly. "Photography just clicked with me. I'm not impatient when I'm photographing, but once I have shot something, I want to see it finished fast. I fell in love with black and white film, and I loved to be in the dark room, to print," she says. Unlike some of her fellow photographic students, travelling long distances to document far-flung stories was ruled out because of her parental duties, so she made a virtue of the fact and began photographing her children, mostly at their summerhouse on the seaside border with Sweden.

"I was just practising," she says. Proof, if any were needed, that necessity really is the mother of invention.

The project will be available as a book, published by Trolley, later this year.