Hanover
On numerous occasions, I’ve set out on an assignment expecting something, and life throws out something completely different. This is exactly what happened on the late July day this photo was made.
I left the office looking for Upper Valley teens who were spending their summers outside of the realm of summer camps and organized activity.
After photographing a group of kids fixing up their grandmother’s house in Norwich, I drove over to Hanover and found a group of high school boys longboarding through a neighborhood.
I approached them and told them who I was and what I was doing, and after a brief period of suspicion and several phone calls to their mothers, I was in.
I photographed the boys longboarding for awhile, and then they decided to cool off by taking a dip in the Connecticut River near the Mink Brook Nature Preserve, where this photo was taken. After about an hour of making photographs of the boys swinging on a rope into the river, the rope essentially had become too loose to use, and the fun was over. That is when 16-year-old Jack Robey, of Hanover, took hold of himself and looked out into the river. Something grabbed me about the way Jack’s spine was illuminated, and it is my hope that the image I made goes beyond conveying the joys of an unstructured summer, but instead conveys a feeling of American boyhood, in all of its glory and vulnerability, its freedom and insecurity.
I can see a bit of myself in Jack, and to me, that is what it is all about.
— Mac Snyder