Ennui

In the summer of 2019, I was feeling the echoes of my teenage self, and the call of long, unstructured, youthful summers.

Ennui is a French word meaning listlessness, exquisite boredom, and a state of dissatisfaction. I find it to be an incredibly inspiring topic and have a nostalgic pull to those long, hot, lazy summer days of late teendom.

I asked my subjects to drink in parks, drive around in cars with the windows down, make out with boys in the back of a restaurant, and reclaim all kinds of teenage shenanigans.

The outcome of this project was a recalibration of the freedom of youth, paired with the delicious agency of adulthood, and strung together with the longing for the open-ended past that is a part of mature, responsible adulthood.

You can see many more of these photographs under the Art Direction collection.

Click on the photos to enlarge and see captions