This book is the second instalment from Marc Vallée’s 90s archive and we find him on the south New Jersey shore. He was a student and spent the summers of 1995 and 1996 teaching photography at an arts camp. Fresh with an analogue camera, he roamed the boardwalk in his free time, exploring his surroundings, pushing his luck and charm. Open to the ambivalences and uncertainties inherent in the landscape, he photographed surfers, young men, beneath the long skies before the sun went down.
The opening chapter observes Marc’s newfound surroundings with a tentative and wandering eye. Time as distance and time as gaze. We follow his curiosity, cruising the wooden boardwalk, magnetised to a boy holding a surfboard who eventually appears to return his gaze from behind dark sunglasses.
Marc’s subjects are not love-bound and sped by desire, as with his later work, but perhaps he was. Desire means longing, searching, secret marks upon a wall, danger, noctambulism and transgressive territory. These surfers emerge idle beneath the sun, drifting into his periphery and portraiture.
The potential eroticism, or lack of, in these images is open to decipher. Is Marc drawn to the performativity of carefree youth in their summer downtime? Partially. They are also autonomous; soft rebels caught between adulthood and boyhood.
Published in 2024. Edition of 400.
