“All Our Friends and Them”

Tales of youth, memory, rebellion, and waning summer at SMUSH Gallery.

Aren't you tired of party games?, Ryan Treppeddi's enigmatic interior.

“You’ll never have friends like you did when you were young,” sang Blake Sennett of Rilo Kiley* on “Greetings in Braille.” A nostalgic sentiment for sure, but chances are, you know what he’s getting at. Friendships among young people conflate identification and desire in a manner that reasonable grownups cannot manage. They are irresponsible, and flammable, and wonderful, even if they don’t always last long.

Because so many young relationships are ephemeral — forged at summer camp, or in the hormonal hothouse of a dorm, or on a long weekend — they come with built-in fatalism that ratchets up the intensity. Soon graduation will come, or the long weekend days will melt into ordinary Monday, or the music will stop playing at the dance, and everyone will drift like balloons to different corners of the sky. Connections dissolve, but the longing haunts you for the rest of your days.

Or maybe it doesn’t. But if you’re at all susceptible to saudade, or the jouissance of memory, I’ll bet you’ll be bowled over like a candlepin by “All Our Friends and Them,” a poetic, brutally beautiful seventeen-artist photo show hanging at SMUSH Gallery (340 Summit Ave.) The exhibition is almost unbearably bittersweet, saturated with affection bordering on obsession with the unrecoverable past. The people depicted in “Friends” aren’t ghosts, because they’re probably still around, and they aren’t fading characters on Polaroids, because the inspired group of photographers in this show bring them to life in sharp lines, vibrant color, and grainy, lively black and white. But there’s still a sense that they’ve all slipped somewhere we can’t touch. These shots are the residue of romantic togetherness — a summertime togetherness — that is the exclusive property of youth, and yesteryear, and things bygone.

“All Our Friends and Them” feels like the spiritual sequel to the very best show SMUSH ever put on: “Alive Is a Matter of Opinion,” the 2021 immersive photo installation by street artist (and “Friends” contributor Christian Gallo. Gallo’s perimeter walk of the shadowy corners of the city didn’t feature many people at all. But it did contain evidence of their presence and activity, and marks on the walls like accidental hieroglyphics: graffiti, tire ruts, empty bottles, spray paint cans, chipping paint in old storefronts, footprints on the muddy verges of ring roads. There was a gathering deep in the fissures of the city. Perhaps you, reprobate, were part of the hijinks.

Is “All Our Friends and Them” a chronicle of that get-together? The subjects of many of these photographs certainly seem unruly enough to punch holes in the fabric of the city. Jahmar Chance catches a boy on the roof of the sort of busted-out sedan that appears, stripped, in ditches, in Gallo's photographs. The rear window of the car is shattered, and the boy is bent over and poised to deliver more destruction. Police tape rings the scene, and other children gather at the periphery to egg on the roof-hopper, or gawk, or follow the crowd to the sort of happenstance that might sear something hot and indelible into a viewer's memory. A few observers film the scene. Notably, it's broad daylight. There’s a sense of authorized mayhem, steam blown off in the schoolyard, young people taking fierce liberties with the old world they’re about to inherit.

What is it about this photograph that makes us certain, immediately and irrevocably, that we’re looking at the world that was rather than the world that is? It’s not the clothes that do it, or the architecture, or even the model of the smashed car. It’s the impertinence of the human figures — the confidence with which they hold themselves and the brazenness with which they face the day. It feels like a missive from an inactive society, one more feral, unmanageable, and tenuously held together than ours. The past is a chaotic country. Rules are flimsier, mobility is easier, and all chickens are free-range. 

We see it again in Jasmine Delgado’s thrillingly flirty image of a young couple on an amusement park slide. The man, bandana on, grasps the sides of the metal separators; the woman, bashful, smiling, grabs on to her burlap conveyor; both about to take a steep plunge together into the unknown.

It could have been shot this summer. Certain small details suggest that it was. Yet the freedom it conveys is a timeless thing. The fluorescent lights behind the subjects and the gentle illumination from the Ferris wheel in the distance reinforce the feeling of fantasy and quiet insurrection against the commonplace. Like John Kenneth’s empathetic shots of gender-transgressive dancers spurring each other towards heights of glittery outrageousness, Delgado’s picture captures a moment that couldn’t have happened if there wasn’t a crowd of daredevils present. This rebellion, it seems, is only possible when people convene. 

And convening is just what we aren’t doing; at least not as much as we used to. Isolation has stolen these moments from us — and encouraged us to be more passive than we used to be. Dorie Dahlberg’s houserocking “People I Once Knew,” an unearthing of images from the early 1980s, made the case that people were simply more compelling visual subjects back then: more self-possessed, more gregarious, more comfortable inhabitors of the external world. They put on the day like a jacket and fill the frames with personality. Dahlberg has placed several of her “People” in “All Our Friends and Them,” and they fit so perfectly with the wistful shots of younger photographers that it feels like she’s a guardian spirit hovering over the entire show. SMUSH gallerist Katelyn Halpern is up to something similar with a series of shots of acquaintances, taken in her youth, some romantic, some innocent, some deliberately blurred, all charged with the prankster spirit of youth, denizens of a time when every night could be Mischief Night if you played your cards right.  

Any friends of Katelyn Halpern are friends of ours.

After painters ruled the summer, photographers have come roaring back to the galleries in the early fall. Anders Goldfarb’s gorgeous “Ash Avenue,” a study in complicated shadow, has taken over the southernmost exhibition space at Drawing Rooms (926 Newark Ave.) Christy O’Connor’s photographic self-portraits brought the dark magic to MoRA (80 Grand St.) in “Cheese and the Worms;” at Eonta Space (34 DeKalb Ave.), the gallerists are readying a photographic intervention in our understanding of what America means. Meanwhile, Edward Fausty, the Garden State’s most enigmatic photographer and storyteller, presents his shots of steps, some concrete and official, some makeshift and organic, all linked to the mysteries of progress and fate, at Outliers (157A First St.)

My favorite photograph of all, though, is tucked in the SMUSH window. It was taken by an artist who I don’t know a thing about: Ryan Treppedi. His best shot of several in “All Our Friends and Them” feels like it had to have been carefully staged, but it also possesses so much suppressed emotion that it had to have been candid. A young African-American woman sits in a suburban house bedecked with balloons and other decorations. There’s a white teddy bear on a table next to her, cosmetics on the counter, and her braided hair has been coiffed into a crown. Her face is buried in her hands. Is she exhausted, or is she having a private moment of anguish? Is this her party, and she’s crying if she wants to, or has the tinsel been hung for somebody else? 

There’s another figure in the foreground, but we don’t see all that much of her. An older woman reclines on a couch and presses one flat hand against a cushion. Her face is out of the frame. She seems oblivious to the distress of the girl, or perhaps she knows about it but she isn’t interested in lifting a finger to help. Between elder and youth, a black dog has interposed itself. It stands in the doorway, part guardian, part omen. Everywhere, there’s light, and most of it is harsh. Some of it trickles in from the outside, some of it rattles hard against the tinsel strips, and some glows from a cheap chandelier hung so low that it could be an interrogation lamp. To be young is to be under suspicion, with feelings ungovernable, secrets unmentionable, and actions unconscionable. That’s precisely why those days never fade.

(“All Our Friends and Them” will hang at SMUSH until October 26. Gallery hours are on the weekends, but the show is viewable whenever SMUSH is hosting an event. When does that happen? Check out the calendar.)

*Technically, “Greetings in Braille” is a song by The Elected, Sennett’s side project. But I like shouting out Rilo Kiley whenever I can.