Summer in the City

Eleni Mettyear’s summer photographs have the quality of not having been thought about. She’s 18, English, and she documents summer in the city the way memory does—grass, water, the faces of friends, a particular light that exists for a few months and then vanishes. No self-consciousness in the composition, just the thing itself.

What strikes me is how immediate it all feels. Her friends are topless and unselfconscious. There’s a collaboration with the singer Florrie that reads like actual friendship rather than a professional shoot. The Polaroids fade and deteriorate and that’s entirely correct. You can taste the heat in these images.

There’s a specific narrowness to the window when you’re young enough that you haven’t started thinking about productivity or whether your work needs to say something. Just August, sweat, friends, the light good enough to take a photograph. It doesn’t last.

What I like is that she doesn’t try to make capital-T Time or capital-F Freedom out of any of it. The photographs don’t have a thesis. They’re not trying to preserve something fleeting or explain the inexplicable romance of youth. They just sit there, untouched—which is the point. Summer. Young. Hot. Grass. That’s enough.