It was barely above freezing outside on a Saturday night in New York City, but it was warm by the fire in apartment 7C. Parlour, the roving exhibition space which sets up shop in a different private apartment every month, was celebrating its second exhibition in the home of Alexander Baxter on Bleecker Street. The show, “Through the Looking Glass,” marked the debut of Collin LaFleche’s “Right After” series, a collection of photographs from 2007 that traces the exploits of a circle of close friends during their last semester of high school. The images are candid snapshots of the teenagers caught running down a snow-soaked street, watching the fireworks over Manhattan, kissing on a front porch. As with much of LaFleche’s other work, the photos have a soft glow, a lived-in feeling, like slices from a collective memory of youth.

The project grew out of a series of images of teenagers in their bedrooms that LaFleche, currently a senior at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, was working on. “A professor recommended I photograph his son, Will, because his room is completely covered in graffiti, pictures, etc,” he says. “When I did, some of his friends came by to watch, and I realized I needed to do something more than just documenting these kids’ personal spaces. I wanted to capture something more intimate and honest, and go deeper beneath the surface.” It took about a month for photographer and subjects to become comfortable with each other, a process helped by LaFleche’s willingness to share: “The most important thing was talking with them, getting them to tell me about their lives and also telling them about mine. You have to show them that you’re willing to be as open with them as they are with you. They’re exposing themselves in a significant and intimate way, and you have to do the same.” To this end, LaFleche appears in several of the images as well, reflected in mirrors or windows, his camera obscuring his face. “I walked a fine line between participant and observer,” he says.

With their ingenuous compositions and casual frankness, LaFleche’s photographs find beauty in the banal. A girl stands lost in thought in a pool hall, surrounded by luminous emptiness. Colorful deflated balloons litter a hardwood floor. The images communicate a sense of loss and longing, but LaFleche is wary of forcing emotion on his photographs. “I think there’s a misconception that you can run in and start shooting away but if you do that you don’t go anywhere because the people you’re photographing realize that you’re using them to express an idea rather than finding the concept/meaning/whatever in the subjects,” he cautions. “It can be very patronizing and hypocritical.”

By documenting this clique, LaFleche inevitably became a part of it, an experience which may have affected him more than it did his subjects. “In some ways it feels as much a part of my past as it was for them,” he explains. “When I started the project I was still digesting my own senior year of high school, and while it is by no means autobiographical, it certainly was a way for me to think about and revisit that time.” The photographs record the wanderings of a privileged—and not just in the financial sense—group of teenagers enjoying their last fleeting moments of youth. The images produce evocative memories in anyone who can recall being irresponsible and unreasonable, no matter how long ago. “I was drawn to Will, and the rest of the group, because they were a lot like me, pretty typical kids,” LaFleche says. “We grew up in different places, and while that certainly changes the way you grow up, it doesn’t change the bullshit you deal with: school, girlfriends and boyfriends and breakups, awkwardness, loneliness, social sparring, sexual sparring, trying to be popular and conform and prove yourself among the group, all of that shit that makes that time in life so hellish. This isn’t a bad thing—it’s just a fact of adolescence.”

collinlafleche.com

Images courtesy of Collin LaFleche

KEYWORDS: art, Collin LaFleche, photography, teenagers

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