4 seasons, six kids in images
Jesse Lenz’s new assortment of images, The Seraphim, opens with a placing picture: A toddler stands going through away from the digicam, hair caught within the wind, gazing out at a forbidding panorama. The body is caught—about to advance, as if it’s a film enjoying out; it holds the promise of an unfolding second. This opening captures the overarching theme of the e-book, which explores by means of the lens of childhood the marvel of life and the rhythms of nature.
Lenz spent 4 years documenting his six kids towards the backdrop of their farm in rural Ohio. These aren’t candy photos of youngsters in nature: “I don’t take into consideration kids (or childhood) as harmless,” he advised me. “Having six, you definitely know they don’t seem to be.” Lenz views nature as a spot for youngsters to find a way of marvel and thriller—and the important factor of hazard: “Nature has at all times been what teaches people first in regards to the cycle of life, dying, and rebirth. It’s the place we’re examined, the place we expertise the numinous, and the place we’re confounded.”
Lenz, the son of a preacher, had childhood goals stuffed with “prophecy, angels and demons, and sin and salvation.” All through the e-book, the creatures of the farm change into each ominous figures and mystical companions. In a single body, a toddler and an owl stare instantly into the digicam; in one other, the identical little one clutches a stuffed owl, blurring the strains between actuality and fiction. “When I’m modifying photos, I’m searching for moments that really feel like they transcend this time or aircraft of existence. Small moments that supply a critique of human rationality and encourage us to open ourselves as much as the transcendent and mysterious,” Lenz defined. He’s excited about that liminal house between the legendary and actual, the hidden and the seen.
The e-book concludes with the imprint of wings etched within the snow. The images seize the fleeting nature of childhood and its enchantments, disappearing as shortly because the snow melts.
