Kid with a Camera

You hand a camera to a random teenager and the worst-case scenario writes itself: kids documenting each other’s violence, their cruelties, their stupidities, all rendered sharper and faster than anyone wants to see. That’s the thing people worry about. That’s what you’d expect.

Tommy Petroni was fifteen when he got a Minolta Maxxum 7000 and a Nikon D40. Kid from somewhere in America, and he did something different. Shot his siblings, his friends, the ordinary stuff around him—and somehow made it look like more than it was. Actual color, actual composition, actual seeing. Posted it to Flickr and moved on.

The randomness of it stays with me. You can’t teach that eye. A kid that age with an actual instinct for light and form, just finding it somehow. Makes you wonder what he became after fifteen, or if he kept going at all, or if the gift just calcified into habit like it does with most people.