At Fifteen, Already

At fifteen I was doing none of this. At fifteen I was imitating Dragon Ball Z moves in order to kick my friends in the head, drinking whatever the older kids had shoplifted from the petrol station, and counting it a good night if I managed to get my hand down the pants of whoever happened to be lying next to me, who was usually in the same state I was. The bar for personal achievement was not set particularly high.

Zach Singh was fifteen and shooting film. The young American photographer channeled everything that age generates in excess—the obsessive attention to other people, the restless energy, the feeling that ordinary life is secretly urgent—into photographs that came out the other side dreamy and direct at once. Intimate without being invasive. His subjects were mostly girls: redheads by rivers, brunettes in white socks on unmade beds, someone half-buried in powder snow. Images that feel like they were made for a specific private archive and then accidentally became art.

There’s a quality the best teenage photography has that working photographers spend whole careers trying to reconstruct. You haven’t yet learned to be self-conscious about what you’re doing, so you just photograph what you actually find beautiful. No concept, no statement, no theoretical scaffolding—just the thing itself and the instinct to preserve it. Singh had it young, and the work showed it: a world that was magical and familiar in equal measure, made from entirely ordinary materials.

The bears are harder to explain. They’re in the photographs. They work. I have no theory for why, and I don’t particularly want one.