Far more affection than angst figures in the adolescent wasteland where the eighteen-year-old photographer Colin Combs portrays his friends, most of them high-school seniors from Dayton, Ohio. Combs’s home town is sometimes called the heroin capital of the United States. His mother, a respiratory therapist, has stories of patients who have overdosed or suffered from trafficking; his father, a car salesman, speaks warily of a gas station near his workplace that attracts opioid addicts. “It’s pretty much everywhere,” Combs said. But he has no interest in succumbing to the specious glory of drugs. In his vivid, unvarnished stills, Dayton instead assumes a melancholy splendor, sheltering artists and skaters whose insouciant dignity resists the clichés that accrue to youth.
Moony and unruffled, his subjects laze together in parking lots, sprint home through rainstorms, and cuddle beneath grubby duvets, doing their best to bear the work of the world. In one shot, a boy lobs what appears to be an apple into the sky, his fist raised as if in triumph, ready to punch the poor fruit as it plummets. Another image, taken beside a pool of water bluer than Barbicide, shows two friends, one behind the other in unintentionally identical poses, their hands laced behind their heads in twin trapezoids. The series—intimate, imperfect, and entropic—evinces little interest in the provocative trendiness of urban retailers or the schlocky optimism of coming-of-age tales. Like Nan Goldin’s early photography, it hews to a harsher but more beautiful reality. “We’re just trying to make art, have fun, and not feel like idiots,” Combs said, speaking of his friends.
A bonfire at the Zygotes’ Halloween show.
Minimalism is the necessary ethos of both his concept and his process. His equipment consists of expired film and cheap or disposable cameras, which Combs receives from patrons, including Wolfgang Grossmann, a school security guard, and Amy Powell, his photography teacher. Powell, who sent The New Yorker a selection of Combs’s images last December—the magazine later had dozens of rolls developed—has indulged her student’s autodidacticism, a trait that some educators might mistake for disobedience. “Sometimes he won’t do the assignments for class,” she said recently, laughing. “But he is always so hungry, prolific, constantly shooting. I’ve never had a student produce as much.” The first camera that Powell offered her pupil was a bulky teal Minolta, which, at the time, matched the shade of his hair dye. Last summer, as always, Combs was wearing a similar model around his neck when an S.U.V. struck him while he was skateboarding, breaking his leg. “I took photos of my foot pretty much right after,” he said, ever ready to render the moment. Combs needed surgery, but his film survived.
Adolescents photographing the fireworks on Fifth Street.
Simon and Marcus running through the rain on Fourth Street.
Xanthe smoking a clove with her cow, Wally.
Chris outside Stivers School for the Arts.
Simon sitting in a shopping cart on Third Street.
Simon and Greer in the back seat of a car.
Simon and Calvin celebrating with fireworks.
Calvin running to Circle K after leaving the Spot Diner on Fifth Street.
Joga and Sam at a “Twin Peaks”-themed party.
Xanthe resting during a car ride from New York to Chicago.
Jason and Bucky hanging out poolside.
Simon punching an apple.
Colin and Xanthe huddled on a futon.
Jason jumping in a pool.
Sourse: newyorker.com
