Bethany Joy: Girls of Summer

Gray nothing overhead. Clouds moving in slow circles, letting light through just long enough to prove they can take it back. I hate the patience of it. Clouds are assholes.

Then Bethany Joy’s photographs stopped me. She was fifteen when she took them, and every frame was pure summer—girls dancing in warm rain, sprawled in wet grass, chasing horses through fields. The kind of life that exists somewhere beyond the noise, beyond work exhaustion, beyond the small ache of just existing in your own time.

I wanted to disappear into them completely. Find that place and stay there. I know better now—summer’s never infinite, photographs lie, and grass gets boring if you stand in it long enough. But looking at her work anyway, I felt it pulling at me hard. Heat and freedom and the idea that nothing outside that moment could touch you. Even knowing it’s a daydream, even knowing the photos are frozen and gone, something in them made me want to believe in it.