Rachel Monroe reviews “The Children’s Melody,” the newest monograph by the photographer Eli Durst, who takes pictures of Texas’s youth.
Durst likes to take pictures of activities—the shared, structured experiences that are neither work nor purely play. His first book, “The Community,” began as a project exploring church basements and then expanded to include other multipurpose spaces that served as the setting for Bible-study groups but also for Boy Scout meetings, team-building exercises, and community-theatre rehearsals.
These everyday American rituals, as seen by Durst’s curious, patient eye, seem mysterious, unexpectedly loaded with significance. A dozen arms stretch toward a loaf of bread; a woman, seen from behind, clasps hands with two mannequins. The images emphasize the surreality and occasional absurdity latent in the things we do to make sense of ourselves and one another. “The Children’s Melody” has a narrower aperture, focussing on young people—roughly of elementary-school age to college—participating in a variety of collective endeavors: R.O.T.C., cotillion, school plays, cheer practice, Irish dance. “I’ve always been drawn to photographing group activities where there’s a rehearsal and a performance. Where there’s sort of a becoming, a practicing and internalizing, and then a performing outward,” Durst told me. He’s interested in “how we learn behaviors, learn gender roles or ideas about value—how they become a part of us and how we then perform them outwardly for other people.” The photographs in “The Children’s Melody” were nearly all shot in Texas, a place that, despite its purported celebration of individual freedoms, is hellbent on shaping its youth. The state accounts for more than a quarter of recorded book bans in the country; many university systems restrict discussions of transgender and nonbinary identities; and a new state law mandates the display of the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom. Durst is interested in institutions that attempt to instruct and influence children, but these are not images of conformity; in “The Children’s Melody,” indoctrination is always ambivalent and incomplete. Durst’s second book, “The Four Pillars,” was made largely during the COVID pandemic. Its ambiguously staged scenes, many involving a New Age self-help group that Durst had been following since the church-basement days, leaned into the strained artificiality of the period. Taking the pictures in “The Children’s Melody” felt like “a return to the world,” in all its baffling complexity, Durst told me. The project crystallized after Durst took a picture of a boisterous group of second graders singing. The resulting image depicts a loose choreography—several children hold their ringed arms in front of them, fingertips touching—but the over-all impression is one of gleeful, expressive chaos. Children look to the left, to the right; they sing with their eyes closed; they stare fixedly at one another; they are quite obviously daydreaming. It’s an image about the attempt to corral individuals into a collective, the task given to our teachers and coaches and troop leaders. In Durst’s work, it’s always only partly successful. As the book progresses, some of the children in the photographs are older and more in control of their outward expression, but scraps of strangeness or incongruity always peek through. The young people in Durst’s images try on guitars, tiaras, military uniforms, graduation gowns, and child-size bow ties, which they inhabit with varying degrees of confidence. Some seem to feel at home in their costumes of adulthood. A girl in lipstick and a blond ringlet wig steps forward, face beatific and chest puffed, as if into an imaginary spotlight. At other times, an outfit seems to amplify vulnerability: An R.O.T.C. cadet in a camouflage getup looks nervously past the edge of the frame at a threat that the viewer can’t see. Durst’s images capture the uncanny temporal quality of children’s faces, how they can sometimes look both much older and much younger than they actually are. One of the book’s most striking images is also the simplest. Four children in semi-formal wear line up against a wall. They are roughly the same age—maybe twelve—but vastly different heights. The second tallest, a boy, looks at the camera with the steady gaze of a future class president. The tallest, a girl in a ruffled skirt, is warier. Their personalities are present but not yet solidified; the adults they could become flicker in and out of focus. This picture is one of a few taken at cotillion, a largely Southern tradition of etiquette classes and formal dance instruction for middle schoolers. In its staginess and structure, it makes for a classic Durst subject matter. Although there’s plenty about cotillion that’s retrograde , Durst’s photographs are free of cynicism. Cotillion is fundamentally about children interacting with one another face to face. The children aren’t sure yet what this will mean to them, and Durst inhabits that uncertainty alongside them. Durst shoots digitally, using multiple off-camera flashes that he deploys to subtly strange effect. The monochrome images are sometimes backlit, sometimes illuminated by directional light coming from unexpected angles. In one image, a flash appears in a mirror as a strange orb, reminding the viewer of the photographer’s presence. The rooms are clean but timeworn; in their shabby surfaces you can see the accumulation of years, the thousands of children who have sat in these chairs, performed these routines, followed these dance steps. One of the book’s first images shows an empty school auditorium. A riser spans the stage, flanked on one side by the Texan and American flags and, on the other, by a fake tree in a large pot. The curtain parts slightly, hinting at a backstage that we can’t quite glimpse. There are stage lights, a microphone, an amp. Nothing in the scene is surreal, and yet the photograph has a dreamlike charge to it, a kind of archetypal intensity that made me think of how many of my anxiety dreams return me to places just like this. The epigraph of “The Children’s Melody” is a brief, didactic poem about children’s activities, written in the sixteenth century by Henry VIII. The monarch praises the “feats of arms” and other “good disports” that are “pleasant to God and man,” a virtuous busyness that keeps at bay the threat of “vice.” Fretting about how young people spend their hours is a perennial adult pastime, one that long predates Minecraft. Hardly any digital technology is present in Durst’s images. Instead, children perform and compete and regard one another. They inhabit a world of brick walls, folding chairs, drop ceilings, exposed ductwork, and chipped laminate at the base of a cracked-open door. A projector sits on a scuffed desk, propped up on a stack of Bibles. A wooden gymnasium floor is so shiny you can almost hear the sneakers squeak. There’s a timelessness to these spaces, but the feelings the images evoke are more nuanced and uneasy than straightforward nostalgia. “I remember being extremely anxious as a young person, extremely nervous about, you know, Who am I, what’s my job going to be, am I a good person?” Durst told me. That sense of anxiety is present throughout the book, most vividly in a wide shot of a group of cheerleaders rehearsing in a gym. Five clusters of uniformed girls press together, arms uplifted, each holding up another girl who balances on one leg. Cheerleading is often portrayed as a performance of effortless perfection and symmetry. Here, the effort is foregrounded. This is a picture of strong thighs and strain, one that makes evident all the work that goes into a human construction that might collapse at any moment. The photographs in the book were taken over the past five years, a period that coincides with Durst’s wife’s pregnancy and their son’s early years. When we spoke on the phone, he was in the final days of parental leave from his teaching job at the University of Texas at Austin, after the birth of his daughter a few weeks earlier. He told me that he hadn’t initially thought of this project as being related to his new parenthood, although looking back now, the connection seems obvious. The family—an ambivalent institution bar none—shapes us, and yet our individuality resists that shaping. We both are and aren’t what our parents, teachers, coaches, and leaders try to make us. That wrestling with what can and cannot be controlled is the work of raising children, and also the work of his photography. “That’s the paradox,” Durst said. “And that’s what makes the pictures interesting to me.”
School Children Photography Photographers
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
The Knicks can only hope the East shapes up like thisIt didn’t take long for Mike Brown to establish his desired up-tempo game and the most significant difference between himself and his predecessor.
Read more »
Former Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins appointed to Texas Supreme CourtHawkins spent two years as Texas’ top appellate attorney, but resigned soon after not signing onto Attorney General Ken Paxton’s 2020 election challenge.
Read more »
Former Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins appointed to Texas Supreme CourtHawkins spent two years as Texas’ top appellate attorney, but resigned soon after not signing onto Attorney General Ken Paxton’s 2020 election challenge.
Read more »
Texas Motor Speedway to host Sick New World Texas Festival in 2026More than 40 bands including System of a Down, Evanescence and Power Trip slated to perform at the festival.
Read more »
U.S. Will Start Photographing All Non-Citizens Entering And Leaving The CountryThe new Department of Homeland Security regulation will require photographs to be collected of all non-citizens when they enter or leave the U.S.
Read more »
Former Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins appointed to Texas Supreme CourtHawkins spent two years as Texas’ top appellate attorney, but resigned soon after not signing onto Attorney General Ken Paxton’s 2020 election challenge.
Read more »