Book Review: The Modern Kids by Jona Frank (Essay by Bruce Weber)
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James, Wirral Club, 2013 It’s important to note that Jona Frank is a female photographer. It’s not just that she was an outsider in a male dominated sport and culture; that alone was probably hard enough to overcome while shooting in the gyms and earning the trust of the young men she was photographing and interviewing. In the Fall of 2010, Jona Frank began to make portraits at an amateur boxing club just outside of Liverpool in a suburb called Ellesmere Port. The trust and relationship that she fought hard to earn between her and her subjects, these young men, these boys, shows in the way they reveal themselves to her and her camera. Their puffery in front of the camera (especially before their bouts), their vulnerability, the way they seem proud or scared to death in their portraits. Whether or not they won or were defeated, their emotion comes across in the honesty that is shown in these portraits of young men struggling, quite literally, with their own coming-of-age and their sense of self as defined by their masculinity.
Book Review: The Modern Kids by Jona Frank (Essay by Bruce Weber)
Book Review: The Modern Kids by Jona Frank…
Book Review: The Modern Kids by Jona Frank (Essay by Bruce Weber)
James, Wirral Club, 2013 It’s important to note that Jona Frank is a female photographer. It’s not just that she was an outsider in a male dominated sport and culture; that alone was probably hard enough to overcome while shooting in the gyms and earning the trust of the young men she was photographing and interviewing. In the Fall of 2010, Jona Frank began to make portraits at an amateur boxing club just outside of Liverpool in a suburb called Ellesmere Port. The trust and relationship that she fought hard to earn between her and her subjects, these young men, these boys, shows in the way they reveal themselves to her and her camera. Their puffery in front of the camera (especially before their bouts), their vulnerability, the way they seem proud or scared to death in their portraits. Whether or not they won or were defeated, their emotion comes across in the honesty that is shown in these portraits of young men struggling, quite literally, with their own coming-of-age and their sense of self as defined by their masculinity.