The Youth You Kept Almost Having

Wine, drugs, and love—Elodie Bambi Tann’s idea of a perfect evening is both completely ordinary and somehow out of reach. Her photographs document the temporary youth of people for whom life still feels like an adventure rather than a sentence. She shot a lot of them in the apartment she used to share with a group of guys, or at parties that got properly messy. The images are strong, honest, and intimate in a way that editorial photography rarely manages.

There’s a specific kind of envy these pictures produce. Not jealousy of any one person or any one moment, but a vague suspicion that somewhere, people are actually living the way you imagined living when you were sixteen. Tann seems to have actually done it—or at least photographed the people who did. Wine and drugs and people who feel exactly the same as you, in a cluttered apartment at 2am, someone’s arm around someone else’s shoulder. The pictures don’t perform nostalgia; they just exist, which makes them harder to shake.