19&

Ritter’s project, 19&, is a documentation of the time between his nineteenth and twentieth birthdays, through the people around him. Often, both humorous and challenging, the work is an exploration of adolescence in all its awkward moments and tenderness.

Nineteen & Tenderness

I would probably forget a lot if not for photographs.  I told a dear friend recently the story of the first time I remember trying to understand love.  I was in eighth grade, real awkward and lost in daydreams all the time.  I had been sitting next to a girl in an art class all semester, at one of those plastic tables where its cold and prickly when you run your fingers across it and the edges feel like they’d been cut out from a model car sheet.  I remember I broke the rules one time so she wouldn’t get in trouble for missing a class.  I was caught of course, and I remember tears streaming because I had forgotten I was thirteen and frail.  Later, more towards the end of the year, she walked into English class a day removed from her wisdom teeth out, her face all swollen and flush.  The feelings were so undaunting then because she looked beautiful.  And that was love; being able to look past a swollen face. 

A few years after, I told her that story because it felt wrong of me to hold onto something like that for myself.  It felt like a secret, and I didn’t want to feel like I knew something about someone else that they didn’t know themselves even if it had much more to do with me than it did with her.  When my friend and I spoke about it, he was confounded by my compulsion to share, offering that I probably know many people that have stories of mine that I don’t remember or have never been told.  It’s incredibly perplexing that photographs can sometimes work in this way.  That they can hold such careful moments in time and tell of stories often forgotten or blind.

I would probably forget a lot if not for photographs.  But not because I make photographs of what I want to remember.  I have gotten much better at identifying what those things are, but for the most part I don’t think we know what we want to remember until we start to forget it.  But I remember through my photographs the same way a new friend makes you remember an old one and a good day makes you remember the bad ones.  So now when I photograph my friends in love, I remember that art class and the girl with the swollen face.  For better or worse, love is different now.  It doesn’t feel easy anymore.  It is desperate and wanting.  It is the pictures in this book, the stumbling dance in the kitchen, and the drunken teens in the dirt, more than anything it was to me then.  But that’s okay because I am no longer thirteen and frail.

I made the first photograph in this book on my nineteenth birthday on a car ride I do not remember much of.  I do remember that it was a four-hour trek to Tampa, Florida with three of a four-piece band and I also remember the consequent four-hour trek home beginning at 11:30 PM when the boys decided to book it home and avoid the cost of a hotel room.  On the drive home, the bassist and I stopped for coffee, the other two passed out in the backseat.  And so, with the air vents blasting on his face and a large black coffee in his hands, I spent the first night of nineteen rotating between sleep and sips of coffee, in a desperate attempt to prevent the now paramedic from falling asleep at the wheel.

I do not know to any degree of truth if the pictures in this book are a realistic depiction of what it means to be nineteen.  To be truthful would be to say that there are very few photographs of people at nineteen on these pages.  The photographs here, however, are a realistic depiction of my nineteenth year and its wavering uncertainties.  I hope that these pictures don’t dissolve into fiction the longer they sit on the pages.  I hope when I am twenty-five these photographs mean just as much to me as they do now.  I mean I hope in six months they give me the same feelings, which is troubling in itself as at times they have made me awfully sad and at others, especially euphoric.

In March of this year, I went to a twenty-second birthday party, and it was beautiful.  I didn’t know the birthday girl very well.  I had made a few pictures of her in her first New York apartment six months prior and was perhaps invited out of habitual geniality.  I brought a friend because I was nervous to be around people I didn’t know alone.  I remember when he poured too much whiskey in a solo cup, and I remember when he acknowledged that.  I also remember when he finished the whiskey and consequently fell asleep on the roof after telling the birthday girl, twenty-two was the worst year of his life.  It was beautiful.  I took him home on the subway and then went back to the party.  I remember shivering on the roof and deciding to move to New York.

Originally, I intended for this book to convey a sense of progression.  Instead, I have recently realized it was quite stupid to assume that I would be a completely different person on my nineteenth birthday than on my twentieth; that birthdays are fixed beginnings and ends.  And so now looking at these pages I have come to the conclusion that these photographs are mostly familiar with an understanding of being young and experiencing so much in quick succession.  It’s really overwhelming.  I don’t think we speak candidly enough about that; how hard it can be to get through a day and the strange exhilaration that can follow the next morning.  The lows ground us, and the highs give us something to live for, but the in-between moments are what I’ve learned to pay the most attention to.  They’re the most difficult to remember. 

In April, I was kicked out of a bar in Austin just a few minutes before the rest of us got in.  I waited down the street, on the sidewalk, in front of an honest fence.  It was warm.  New friends were walking in, but I remember I didn’t want them to see me.  The streetlights were baking me into the pavement, and I wanted it to stay that way, without interruptions.  I turned my back when they came out to take me back to the house and I stayed quiet in the car ride.  I remember feeling ashamed to be nineteen.  I walked the dog when we got in.  It felt sweet to be anticipated, to be useful.

A few weeks ago, I photographed a young woman by some train tracks near her home.  When I asked her why she liked train tracks so much, she told me that being so close to something that invited such destruction was an opportunity of constant defiance.  That to reject it was a privilege.  That really got me.  Sometimes I wish I could stop time and write some of these things down because the way she said it was a lot better than what I can remember.  But she said it while smiling and I thought that was important.

There has been an innate tenderness to this year.  It was at all the birthday parties.  It was in the way my friends held Petey, the hairless cat.  Just as it was in the crowds of those punk shows, the creek in New Jersey, and every draw of a cigarette closer.  In everything, there has been a desperation for the physical in the most delicate of pleas.  Sometimes it helps to imagine music playing like one great big opera.  Sometimes everything in slow motion like an earnest ballad of graceful gestures.  And sometimes you don’t even need to imagine music at all.  It’s already playing and its perfect.