Elite visual storytelling and youth culture. I’ll throw some titles at you.
A literary adaptation to film featuring signature Kubrick widescreen shots filled with the exploits of troubled youth who are products of an immoral future society.
An extremely of the time 80s movie where the main characters, the Heathers along with Winona Ryder’s Veronica, are products of an immoral contemporary landscape - where the mystique of teen suicide serves as a perfect cover for murder at will.
A story of 90’s teen life where sex and murder are heavily stylized if not glamorized.
A descendant of the school of Larry Clark, scored with what sounds like royalty-free rap music that doesn’t quite capture the feel but gives you a general sense of where you are.
Larry Clark 101. With an NC17 rating, Kids is nearly impossible to find even in the age of just about everything streaming on one platform or another. The actors are real, and their stories, despite or perhaps because of their inclination for tragedy, feel that way too.
Another Larry Clark film, and perhaps the official filmed introduction to the now enduring underboob, brings us into the lives of Floridian teens including Cousin Derek portrayed by Daniel Franzese (or Damien from Mean Girls) as the worst person to ever commit a crime with.
We don’t get a lot of insight into why these people are the way that they are, but we do see the effects they have on one another.
Outside of the medium of film, Euphoria too is a product of the school of Larry Clark. Unlike Bully, Euphoria has traversed time and place from the beginning in order to tell us why the characters are who they are, as it relates to their choices as well as the people responsible for them in childhood. In a direct connection to Bully, soon to be young adult men hold a fear of their own sexuality that manifests in unhealthy expressions of it, drug use is portrayed as matter of fact (as it is), and even in the face of trouble, unsupervised freedom as experienced in youth and informed by the specific context of the time, is a platform for freedom and experience. Wherever the two lead.
Although not a recurring theme in Bully the way that it is in Euphoria, the continuum of experiential trauma is also explored in both. Where an episode shows you the way that Nate’s dad or Fezco’s grandmother’s difficult choices directly result in the people that Nate and Fezco are today, Bully is more subtle, doing the same work through the portrayals of parents who believe the bad example to be anyone but the child living in their own households, or with Heather casually telling the story of her grandfather, her grandmother’s murder, and her mother’s lifelong and complex obsession with familial and sexual violence…
Why the film synopses?
A stream of consciousness, a moment of introspection that forces one to look out at what’s stuck… I suppose?
Thinking about what sticks and what doesn’t (in the context of these sorts of stories) has meant thinking about how media that deals with youth is often focused on teaching lessons instead of learning from or about the subjects portrayed. This is true even in the best of cases, take the anti-pot episode of Freaks and Geeks for instance.
You may not know much about the single season NBC series that’s basically a blueprint for the Judd Apatow era of cinema, but smart writing and incredible casting didn’t do what you might think they’d have done to appease a network that couldn’t understand why nerds and potheads would be the kids you’d want to portray for any reason, especially to tell their stories.
Familiarity with Apatow’s later work and the complaints of network heads translate to status quo storytelling that has a weed high portrayed like an acid trip to satisfy D.A.R.E era propagandists, but the core of the show makes it one that can resonate with today’s typically more informed viewers. Viewers who aren’t interested in acting like their stories are or were the stories of picture perfect young people, and even if their stories are closer to those than to that of a Rue, Cassie, or even Chloë Sevigny’s Jennie in Kids, that doesn’t make those stories any less worth telling.
Of course, until you start to tell these stories, you don’t even get to a place where conversations about why they should be told are being had. There’s nothing like silence to stigmatize…
Storytelling is an elite mode of contributing to conversation and shifts in conversation can equate, in a very literal way, to the freedom to live.
Recommendations usually come at the end but it feels worth mentioning a recent episode of the podcast FANTI touches on this a bit with a conversation around Whitney Houston and how criticisms of her drug use from the war on drugs generation and the inability for Houston to freely express her sexuality in the shadow of the AIDS crises played a role in her life as a tragedy. A doubly tragic realization in light of the sort of support both celebrities and (hopefully) everyday people are able to receive today because of the ways that what we know now informs the conversations we have.
What makes the storytelling that happens in the titles mentioned above resonate with us even years after debut is what makes them important. These titles are examples of superior film and television, not because of portrayals of drugs, sex, or violence, but because of a sort of witnessing.
It’s worth noting that this witnessing is being done through varying but highly visual storytelling.
Making art of our experiences drives the stories home that much more, and aside from film and television, one of the most adaptable, adjustable, and enduring ways to do this is through photography.
If the commercials are to be believed, you basically can’t sell on Depop without buying on Depop, so I guess it was unavoidable that I bought a Polaroid, an item second only to talking Beavis and Butthead dolls in terms of requested childhood Christmas gifts that I’d never receive, while selling vintage during the earliest days of the pandemic.
Eventually, I would document faces and spaces in Mexico, an unexpected home for a little over a year once travel felt possible again. Later I’d try my best to get in motion shots of skaters in NYC and Houston.
I did not consider this a step towards becoming a photographer. I do not know what to do with my photos. But I do know that I have become, through a process of aesthetic archival work, a certain kind of visual storyteller.
I suppose this is where youth and visual storytelling come together for me personally, as I am reaching back to something I wanted then to tell the stories I am telling through these photos now. Even if I’m only telling them to myself…
I’ve always admired the people who do that sort of work. The first interviews published through this newsletter were with Margaret of A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour, who captures a very specific niche of hotels and resorts while road tripping with her partner, and Bekah of Caught Up Creatives, an NYC inspired Dublin based creative firm that started with photography as a way to approach creative collaborations.
And in the tradition of conversation with visual storytellers, I sat for a chat with Stephanie Rodriguez, the photographer and collaborator behind the shots you’ve seen interlaced with these words, who I’ve wanted to talk to about inspiration and process for quite some time.
That said, I did not intend the introduction to that interview to be an essay, and so…
For the interview, full shoot images, recommendations, and grant and work opportunities in the arts and creative industries, subscribe now for part two of this newsletter in your inbox.