Adult Swim

Being a teenager is mostly an exercise in trying very hard to look like you aren’t trying at all. Confidence is performed long before it is actually acquired. Everyone wants to be seen. Nobody wants to look like they want to be seen.

These photographs were made in my parents’ pool while I was in high school. A cheap underwater camera moved around between friends. Boys showed off while the girls posed. We were somewhere between being kids and becoming adults, already interested in attraction and how we appeared to one another without really understanding any of it yet.

There was no intention of making a body of work. Twenty years later, the repetition suggests otherwise: the same pool, the same friends, the same camera, over and over again. While a group of teenagers were practicing versions of the adults they imagined themselves becoming, a photographer was unknowingly practicing too.

Memory insists there was something innocent about all of this.

The photographs are less certain.