The Kid With the Minolta

Give a teenager a camera and statistically the results are not inspiring. The internet in 2009 was already straining under documentation taken by people with equipment but no eye—blurry clubs, bad angles, the kind of photography that mistakes motion for meaning. The fifteen-year-old with a phone or a DSLR was usually just extending this tradition with higher resolution and more available storage.

Tommy Petroni is fifteen, American, and the exception that makes the rule annoying. He photographs his siblings, his friends, the world immediately around him—the material that most teenage photographers treat as filler between attempts at something they consider more serious—and he has something with it. A sense of color that doesn’t announce itself. A timing that makes the familiar look caught rather than composed. He works with a Minolta Maxxum 7000 and a Nikon D40, which is an interesting pairing—one film, one digital—and the combination gives his Flickr archive a tonal range that many adults with twice the equipment wouldn’t know how to manage.

There’s a specific quality to photographs made by someone still young enough to be genuinely interested in the people around them, before that interest hardens into self-consciousness or style. You can feel it in what he makes. Whether this develops into something serious over the long run or whether this is simply what certain fifteen-year-olds look like before they learn to be ordinary—I can’t say yet. Either way, the images are real now, and that’s what counts.