Think cupcakes and hair ribbons, lace and snowflakes. Think Maria von Trapp, the Jeans West girl and Elmer Batters. As a mix of imagery, these things might be thought of as softcore, but they move us some way toward entering Deborah Paauwe's world of happy-sad photographs of young girls. It is a nice place to be. Since graduating from the University of South Australia in 1993 Paauwe has been producing what catalogue essays refer to as 'Deborah Paauwe images'. She has a pret-a-porter iconography, a basic, though perfected formula of intense primary colours, soft skin, plush fabric, close cropping, flooded light and a candy coating. A Paauwe picture oozes sweetness. But, deliberately, euphemistically crude (and frequently corny) titles make all this saccharine loveliness shrivel up into something a bit sexy and quite often enigmatic. The artist pushes her carefully crafted aesthetic to the limit and makes it stick, and this is her real strength. Paauwe's photographs were included in the exhibition 'The Syntax of Style' at the Australian Centre for Photography in 200 I, which featured artists 'who exploit the language of fashion photography in the pursuit of art'. This was one of the first instances of her photographs being exhibited under the direct rubric of fashion photography and its mediation through advertising. While studying in London during 2000 (courtesy of a Samstag Scholarship) at the Chelsea College of Art & Design, Paauwe worked at the vintage clothing store Steinberg and Tolkien and borrowed the clothes featured in many of the photographs from her ' Sugar Nights' series (2000). The cropped and fragmented bodies from this and other series such as 'Blue Room' (1998) and 'Tuesday's Child' (2001) are reminiscent... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline