fototazo: Photobook Review: "My Last Day at Seventeen" by Doug DuBois

Doug DuBois
My Last Day at Seventeen
Aperture, 2015
156 pages, 79 images, includes illustrations by Patrick Lynch, 9 3/8 x 12 1/4 inches

Also reviewed on: Collector's Daily, Hyperallergic
Additional links: TIME, Lens Culture, Lomography

Additional links on fototazo: Interview Part I, Interview Part II
Additional link on My Last Day at Seventeen by...me: Exposure 48:1 Spring 2015

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I long promised a third part to fototazo's interview with Doug DuBois, the first two parts to which I've linked to just above. We did a preliminary interview for it, but in the end other commitments prevented it from materializing. Instead, now that My Last Day at Seventeen has come out, I'd like to bookend the interviews I did with DuBois during his process of working on the book by cracking the cover and taking a look at the finished project.

This review generally doesn't aim to judge the book, but rather understand how it works.

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My Last Day at Seventeen (MLDAS) contains 79 portraits, staged tableaux, and spontaneous photographs made over five summers in the working-class Russell Heights housing estate located in the coastal town of Cobh in southwestern Ireland.

The book is comprised of four components: the main passages of photographs, a graphic novel-style comic by Patrick Lynch presented in a series of inserts, two sequences of photographs inserted in the same way as the comics and a short ending text.

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In MLDAS, DuBois wraps together several elements to create an investigation of - and revisions to - the traditional coming-of-age narrative: Ireland, the working class, an economic downtown, an insulated community, DuBois' aesthetic vision, the American-ness of that vision, a middle-aged man photographing adolescents and the perspective of a man looking back at his own youth with a sense of loss, to name a half-dozen.

The coming-of-age rite of passage seems at risk of being a still born because of the lack of access to jobs and education for the adolescents of Russell Heights during the end of the Celtic Tiger. Through the complete absence of references to employment or future study in MLDAS, we sense that the next stage of the lives of the subjects is uncertain and the traditional coming-of-age narrative of graduation leading towards new opportunities appears at the point of breaking down. In one photograph, a house with a boarded up window and a "For Sale" sign signals the larger economic difficulties causing the lack of opportunities. That's all we need to understand the larger context. Here DuBois plays a subtle hand well from the elements he works from.

The creation of a world without adults in MLDAS is another twist on the more traditional coming-of-age story that plays on the distinctive elements from which the book was made. This mythical world composed of only teens set within a circumscribed, shared space of drinking holes, alleys and hang outs in which no single subject dominates suggests the collective youth experience defines the individual experience. The neighborhood peer community thus defines the "self" for these teens more so than the institutions of church, parents, nation, work or school, bringing focus to the shared moment of confrontation with the arrival of adulthood.

DuBois singes his images with the melancholic sense of loss that accompanies looking backwards across the landscape of one's own youth and meditating on the sense of loss in leaving adolescence. Doing so gives a much different feel to his portrayal of coming-of-age than other contemporary portrayals, such as the hormone addled teens of Kids, the sensuality of youth adolescence found in Sally Mann's work, the teen awkwardness of Seth and Evan in Superbad or the rebellious fuck you vibe of the train-hopping community in A Period of Juvenile Prosperity.

The book twists and updates the standard coming-of-age narrative, but it is not limited to the particulars of its subjects, time and place. What's most valuable about this project is how DuBois' working techniques push the book beyond the specific conversation.

DuBois pillages the vocabulary of documentary photography freely – frontal, formal, full revealing summer mid-day light, sharp focus and, in his portraits, most often a shallow depth of field. He also works, however, with techniques such as digital compositing, reenacting scenes, staging and poses borrowed from movies and other sources that push away from the straight documentary tradition into the worlds of Larry Sultan or Dziga Vértov.

The intermixing of techniques traditionally assigned to "documentary" and "art" helps create an abstraction based in reality – this is Ireland but not only Ireland, working class but not only working class, Russell Heights but not only Russell Heights. MLDAS is not limited to being a document of a certain group at the crossing of four dimensions. Instead, by freely mixing traditions, the book shows its willingness to put the greater truth above a singular truth, to sacrifice the document in order to more richly represent the inevitable bittersweetness of the end of youth.

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MLDAS present two core narrative structures – linear and cyclical – that create a basic tension in the work and that coexist uneasily in the best of ways. It taps into basic questions about how we frame our experience of our lives and part of the book's power is to show that the same lives can be viewed through different narrative constructs depending on how you look and that these narratives are not mutually exclusive.

The linear narrative begins from the cover with a three drawing sequence lifted from one of Lynch's comics. A character hitting a hurley ball says, “Well, let’s...fucking...go!”

Turning the cover, here we... fucking go! There are no empty white pages, no standalone title page, no dedication or introductory quote from an Irish literature giant you thought was just the name of a bar in Boston. In the two images above, we can see how the book opens directly to the first part of the title on the left and the first image in a two-image sequence on the right. Turning the page we see the second image of the two-image sequence and the second part of the title on the right. The kids in the two photographs have fallen to the right from one image to the next as they wrestle, moving forwards into the book, just as the three figure drawings on the cover moved us left to right into the book.

From the two sequences, we move to an image of a boy lying down with his arm across his face in what appears to be a backyard, blocking his face from the sharp light. This image sets up the idea of the "last day" with a sense of dawn. The book doesn't continue with any sort of day's chronology, instead letting this first image and the title install "a day" as a linear temporal frame.

Many of the spaces and events in the photographs that follow also suggest a forward narrative thrust by their connections to rites of passage defined by a "before and after." A jump from a high structure into water, a crashed car and a star etched into a forearm, for example, all imply teenage rites of passage fulfilled. In addition, a number of times as we move through the pages, we turn a corner and see someone we met earlier in the book. The repeated subjects appear at different ages, underscoring the idea of time passing.

Patrick Lynch's comics, inserted between sections of photographs, provide a parallel linear development as they build a narrative through the book, guiding the book forwards with vignettes based around two main characters (discussed more below).

As we get to the book's end, however, we also see how the comic repeats frames from the end at the beginning (or vice versa), creating a sense of return, drawing us back into the book to start again. We also see that the bonfire images that open the book have a companion image at the end (above), furthering a sense that the narrative of MLDAS also works cyclically. As we look back through the book, we can find a number of images with elements that echo the cyclical structure: adolescents having babies, two young girls in wedding dresses, a print of an image we find the book taped inside another image on a bedroom wall which, in a different way, also emphasizes the idea of cycles.

There are components of the book that help to form connections between the linear and cyclical core narrative structures. The mix of ages of the various subjects in the book creates both a sense of a survey of adolescence, a look backwards across the whole experience of youth fitting more with a linear understanding, but also providing a glimpse at how the coming of age narrative will cycle again in those just entering adolescence as others reach eighteen.

There's also one image in particular where I see the two narrative ideas crossing, in a figure carrying a white door through a field. This door could be another symbol of crossing a threshold forwards, or it could be the removal of that threshold by unhinging it, leaving it dysfunctional, a reading that would also support the earlier conversation around the frustration of the coming-of-age narrative by the economic context these adolescents have grown up in.

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Alec Soth, in apparently impeccable Spanish, said in a recent interview with El País that, "La fotografía se está pareciendo cada vez más a la escritura," or something like, "Photography is increasingly similar to writing." MLDAS pushes that fusion closer.

A post on Lomogaphy – I can't find the author listed anywhere on the page – states that the comics and photographs in MLDAS form "two distinct narratives in one book." DuBois himself, in an interview on Lens Culture, says that the comic narrative "complicates the reading of the photographs and our imagined experience of growing up in Cobh."

I experience the opposite: the comics thread the photographs together more specifically and they – comics and photographs - function together, sharing story elements and a single consistent mood to make potential readings both clearer and limited. The consistency of mood works between the photographs and comics to place me in a created world that has particularity, but not singularity, giving me a fairly specific range to understand the book without telling me too directly how to experience it.

To explain why I get this sense, first it should be pointed out that word and image are yoked solidly together from the opening sequence in MLDAS. We start with the figure from the comics speaking text, then transition into pages that cut between the two-image bonfire sequence and the two parts of the title.

From there we quickly see in the first comic insert that the comics feature faces and subjects in line with those portrayed in the photographs, and we also see that the photographs, especially through graffiti, carry the text of the comics into the real world. The two sequences of photographs inserted into the book the same way as the comics - one of a boy juggling a soccer ball and the other a backyard barbecue with the subjects playing with a gun - are another way to close the gap between the photographs and comics. They are presented as a series of small squares the size of a frame of the comics on the same paper stock as the comics, which differs from the paper used for the photographs (see gun sequence image farther below).

This tight relationship between photographs and comics helps them function together as one narrative that forms a consistent mood. While the book contains images of tenderness and connection – a couple in a doorway, the girl with a hand on the boy's bare chest, a boy goofing around with some sort of fake eyelashes taped onto his eyelids - the two-image bonfire sequence that opens the book establishes a darkness that signals the dominant mood of the rest of the pages.

The boys appear to be hugging in the first image, but in the second we see the "hug" is actually wrestling - with the combatants getting closer to the flames. Other photographs then reinforce this mood through gesture, event and environmental context. We have the rough grasp of hair and redness of skin in the haircut image (above), the crude graffiti in many images, an abandoned car crash scene, the fresh homemade cuts of a star on skin, broken windows, a middle finger and two kids grabbing each other's shirts, ready to fight on a wall. In sum, the passage to adult, which could be seen as a celebration and as an inevitable right, instead is presented as a struggle for survival, a process through which not all will pass.

In the book's closing sequence of photographs, we see a cross, a stigmata reference and then a sort of pietà in the image of one girl plucking the eyebrows of another (the three above images). In these references to the Catholic Church, DuBois opens a conversation about the search for solace, understanding and meaning in the darkness of the his coming-of-age narrative interpretation, suggesting the lens through which many in the community he has photographed would most likely look to understand and overcome difficult times.

The narrative of the comics reinforces the mood of the photographs. They present what appears to be a couple. They portray the male as alienated and the comics end by implying his suicide. This reading is corroborated by the dedication to the memory of three local youth placed at the end.

The darkness of the comics directly affects how we understand the photographs as one narrative that forms a consistent mood. In the clearest example, above, we see a photograph of woods that, after finishing the comic narrative, we understand as possibly the place where the insinuated suicide happened.

There's only one place where the narrative possibilities narrow so much that the suggested range of reading feels more like a demand, leaving me little room to participate: the gun sequence. This feels true to the experience of the world presented, but also too direct. The theme of violence becomes explicit and the ways to read the sequence - and perhaps the theme - become singular in dimension.

To give a place where I see a theme treated more subtly working better, we can just look back to the photograph mentioned earlier, where the economic downturn in Ireland limiting the immediate future of teens from Russell Heights is suggested through a single “For Sale” sign on a house with a broken window. We feel the greater presence without the need for it announcing itself more loudly.

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The last photograph in the book is covered over by the transcription of a conversation between one of the repeating subjects in the book – Eirn – with Doug and a couple of others in which Eirn explains why the photograph that is covered by the transcript can't be used in the book.

She knows she will, in part, be defined by the photograph and in the image she sees herself - and believes that her friends and family will see her - as a "knacker," presented in a tracksuit with a dirty towel behind her.

What does this ending do? First, it completes the sewing together of text and image as the book has worked to do since the cover and the presentation of the title between the bonfire images . Second, it corroborates the feeling of collaboration between the subjects and DuBois we have experienced in the book in which we see a relaxed intimacy between photographer and subject in the closer portraits, in the access granted to spaces where most adults are probably not welcomed such as drinking holes, and in DuBois' eye-level, or, less frequently, below eye-level framing of those he photographs.

Lastly, and most importantly, it presents a young woman taking control of her life through taking control of her image. In this way Eirn completes the coming-of-age narrative that we have seen threatened in various ways during the book by economic lack of opportunity, violence and suicide: the girl who gave the project its title through a comment she made early in the process of making the photographs also ends the project by passing through the last rite of passage of her adolescence - assuming control of and responsibility for herself as an adult.

4.01.2016

Photobook Review: "My Last Day at Seventeen" by Doug DuBois