This girl was one of photographer Nacio Jan Brown’s favorite subjects. His photography notes for this full sequence (see below images) read: “I took about twenty shots of her with the string. The thing I like best about this sequence is the transformation from a sultry nymphet in the third picture back to a little girl in the fourth.”
Brown’s interpretation of Kathy as a “sultry nymphet” perhaps reflects a larger way adolescent girls were perceived on the street, simultaneously as the children they chronologically were as well as the object of male sexual desire. The fact that young women were accepted as sexual creatures meant that poor young women living on the Avenue were able to capitalize on their sexuality in exchange for what they needed to survive. It also meant that older men sexually pursued these young girls, in possibly exploitative ways.
The sequence in Brown’s Rag Theater runs as follows:
