Whatever Bethany Joy Was Running Toward
Grey March does something to the brain. The clouds cycle overhead with the specific menace of weather that has already decided to stay, admitting light only to prove a point, and by mid-afternoon everything looks like it was designed to discourage effort. I found Bethany Joy’s Flickr during one of those afternoons and spent twenty minutes inside someone else’s summer.
She was fifteen when she shot these, and the photographs carry that specific quality that sometimes appears at that age: an unselfconscious intimacy with the world that adults spend years trying to recover and usually can’t. Dancing in hot rain. Lying in wet grass with friends, looking at nothing in particular. Horses chased across a field—or maybe following, it’s hard to tell from the blur at the edge of the frame. The colors are the oversaturated pastels of actual summer rather than a filtered approximation of it. No obvious composition tricks, no artfulness announcing itself. Just someone pointing a camera at the things around her that seemed worth keeping.
What I was responding to, I know, is only partly the photographs. The other part is the desire to be elsewhere—specifically there, in that grass, in that rain, in whatever rural somewhere produces landscapes that look like that. Grey clouds feel personal in March. They’re not, but they do. And then you scroll through images of horses and wet fields and someone’s friends laughing in weather that looks warm even when it’s wet, and the desire to drop everything and go becomes briefly overwhelming before it passes and the grey reasserts itself.
Flickr in that era had a texture worth noting now that it’s mostly gone. People uploaded photographs because they wanted to share what they’d seen, not because they were constructing a persona or optimizing for engagement. The result was an enormous quantity of work that was personal and specific and occasionally genuinely beautiful. Bethany Joy’s summer photographs are that. They don’t announce themselves. A girl and her friends and some horses in the rain—and somehow that’s enough to make March feel, for a moment, much further away than it is.