Each month the PRC’s Northeast Exposure Online shares the work of an emerging New England photographer.  Last November Leah Fasten was featured.  Fasten’s project-in-process was made up of portraits of her young son — images “investigating the anticipation and awe of watching my son, Zach, on the cusp of independence.”

I always think it’s interesting to see what happens when artists go about something as natural and everyday-photographer as taking photos of their children.

The first time I saw Abelardo Morrell’s childhood images, I recognized the serene black and white, the cleverness of form and light.  Despite the very different subject matter, all that made Morrell’s familiar camera obscura and book photographs a wonder — it was all still in there, in these family portraits.  But, there is something different going on when one’s own family is the subject.  You can see it here.

There is perhaps nothing more personal than a photographer lending his so-often-shared view of the world to images of his children.

[Julian and Brady Sitting by Abelardo Morrell]

Fasten’s images aren’t so far off from your backyard snapshots.  But there is something that much more deliberate about them; they’re square and distant and framed.  There is certainly this sense of just what she says in her statement… the watching of this person as he negotiates the bit of world he has to explore in front of him (but within the watchful eyes of his caretaker).  The image of Zach alone on a swing could have come across as deeply melancholy, but no, I feel like we know mom isn’t far away.

Granted, Fasten’s Zach pictures aren’t all taken quite from this perspective of protective distance.  The breathtaking image Hair [below, top] is wondrous and bold, and not so different from the porcelain youths of Loretta Lux‘s photo-paintings [as in The Blue Dress, below, bottom].

But Fasten’s child is not some photographic statue.  That’s an unfiltered blast of light, revealing real skin and hair, and a clutter of out-of-focus beach-goers trotting about the background.

This balance between intimacy and distance, though, I think is particularly noteworthy.  It is probably a space only a parent could inhabit.

And maybe it’s the haircut or the sweaters, but there’s this wonderful timeless everychild in Morrell and Fasten’s kids and how they are portrayed.  I am certain I had that haircut once, or lack thereof, my hair bushy and unkempt.  I feel like I know how that sweater feels, and you probably do to.

Maybe most remarkable, the images really convey the persistent shortness of being so young.  It’s marvelous.

And again, maybe its the haircut.  But I can’t help think of young Danny in The Shining, looking at these young people.  Innocent but not innocuously so.  Inhabiting shortness.  Navigating the perimeter of the boundaries our parents have set, and brushing up against the dangers of going a step too far.

I think I came across Peter Snyder’s motorist photos before the similarly themed work of Andrew Bush, and maybe didn’t even realize they were different works when recalling these portraits of travelers framed by their car windows, when I wrote about the Vector Portraits.

Taking another look at Snyder’s series Idling, it’s clear that he is portraying a quite different component of the experience commuting by car.  Stop lights.  Intersections.  Traffic jams.  This work turns out to be much more in the tradition of Evans’s subway portraits… though of course those were portraits of people going somewhere.  These people are stuck — even if the subway ride was routine and passive and a period to be lost in thought.  Idling shows how travelers are forced into this passive, powerless state, even in the autonomous automobile.

It’s interesting to see that Snyder shows a number of people doing something else as they wait, grasping at something to do with their hands or occupy their minds — reading, eating, talking on the phone.  Otherwise, there’s a quiet desperation or an emerging tension in their faces; stir-craziness settles in.  Or at least, like Evans’ portraits, the face is so blank, one can project all sorts of things onto it.

Snyder writes of this work, “There’s a collective sense of living-as-waiting, a continual holding of the breath, in anxious anticipation of the next disaster. This is the big waiting — the stuck feeling, the giving over of control — that mirrors and sometimes leaks out into the small waiting for the light to change.”

Photographs by Alex Meriwether, 2008

As Labor Day signifies a forthcoming New England autumn, I look back to a Memorial Day weekend visit to the Massachusetts seaside town of Rockport, where slabs of stone extend along the seashore in heaps.  They look like an endless supply of beached whales, melting into the ground, beaten down by the sun, hardened into rock.  As they climb further up onto land, the rocks expand into more formidable figures.

I recall looking upon the tourists and visitors scrambling slowly across these rocky surfaces.  In multicolored summer clothing these abstract and awkward beings became the cliche uttered by every skyscraper observation deck visitor — “they all look like ants.”

But to be on the same plane as these ants, and in this natural setting that so overpowers them, the experience is much more surreal.

I of course couldn’t stop thinking about Youngsuk Suh’s series Instant Traveler — subtly manipulated digital images of natural wonders and hiking sites, overrun by visitors.  My snapshots of Rockport couldn’t capture the feeling of being in a Suh photograph, but that was very much what I felt.  His natural expanses are bleak and beautiful, sunlit with objective early-afternoon clarity; the people seemed air-dropped in — out of place and inconsequential extras.

[Arches National Park, Utah, 1] Photograph by Youngsuk Suh, 2002

[Rocky Mountains National Park, Colorado] Photograph by Youngsuk Suh, 2000

More of Suh’s photographs are available for viewing on his website.