Limbo

In Limbo, a series of black and white gelatin silver prints, I sought to express an emotional sense of place based on my own memories of adolescence in New Jersey. I found it mirrored in interactions with the teenagers I met this year in small towns in upstate New York. My photographic subjects are between childhood and adulthood, surrounded by a landscape which is between rural and suburban (perhaps "ruburbia").

Initially I had intended to make my project about northern New Jersey where I had lived until I was eighteen. I wanted to use my camera and memory to tell a story about living in "the middle of nowhere" a town forty minutes from any sources of commercial entertainment like a movie theater, where we had parties in fields, and spent most hang-out time in-transit to each others houses. But instead of going to New Jersey I began to explore the counties surrounding Bard and quickly found the images I had been imagining. The landscape: oppressive in its vastness and our detachment from it, the repetition of dispersed humanity; towns with little more than strip malls to call community centers, all of this I remembered so well from my teenage years.

Everywhere the idyllic landscape contrasts with the boredom of the youths I photograph. Prefab houses sit like unnatural blemishes on the earth, echoing the new growth of these adolescent bodies. Trapped in hormonal boredom, waiting for something to happen, I found them sitting or walking around after school, on weekends. Not much to do and nowhere to go, they keep moving: in cars (the ultimate freedom), walking, trying to find a place to hangout, smoke pot, escape. These portraits and landscapes are about my memories of a place that formed me, and the loneliness of being a kid in "ruburbia."