Larry Clark + Where the Boys Are

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	• Spring Broke Nathaniel Welch, Steve Appleford powerHouse Books, 2004 - 120 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Larry Clark + Where the Boys Are

What's happening to the youth of today? Well, number one, they're having a hell of a lot of fun and you can see the results in Nathaniel Welch's book SPRING BROKE.

One girl has a T shirt that says, "I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings." She looks a bit like the very young Cybill Shepherd, with Shepherd's cockeyed superiority, as though she were in on the joke, even if the joke was on her. Welch is a fine photographer and one wonders how he got releases from some of his subjects, especially the two boys and three girls he photographs making out in the shower. The girls are wearing thongs, I guess to preserve decency, but the one boy's just wearing a backwards baseball cap. When they're US Senators will they be trying to suppress these photos? Who can tell, in another twenty years spring break may be happening all year round and maybe even in the senate chamber.

The funniest photo may be the one of the tiny hotel refrigerator completely filled with alcohol, beer and mixers. You couldn't even fit in a radish if you wanted to.

Potentially an incendiary book, SPRING BROKE plays it cool and doesn't take sides. You have the feeling that Welch, who must be nearly forty by now, has a true love for these kids akin to Larry Clark's. Good work all around.

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whistful and disturbing

Despite its title, this is not a "girls gone wild" in hardcover, but rather a series of thoughtful portraits about the desperate and sad reality behind the drunken revelry of spring break. Welch's photos are stark and honest without being lurid or judgmental. The book really captures the whole profane youth culture that is informed more by beer ads and porn films than anything else. Welch is a top-flight photographer and this book highlights his talents to a great degree.

Caligula would have understood the depraved decadence and desperate frenzy of spring break - American teens' annual pilgrimage to shimmering shores, where sex on the beach is as much an afternoon activity as it is a fruity cocktail. A festival of sun and sin, of tanned flesh and binge drinking, spring break attracts thousands of high school and college students, who wash up on Florida's shores like schools of breeding salmon, ready to indulge their insatiable apetites and hedonistic desires with total strangers. A native Floridian, photographer Nathaniel Welch has been documenting these rites of passage for four years - and has captured scenes of agony and ecstasy in Spring Broke, his first monograph. Whether it's partying at a kegger on the beach or engaging in group sex in the shower, entering a wet T-Shirt contest or passing out on the bathroom floor, these teens' uninhibited impulses are as absurd as they are disturbing. Yet Welch accepts, and even embraces, these raunchy rituals of extreme adolescence, alloing a strange sense of sadness to pervade. The morning after, broken spirits are left to reflect on their senseless acts, pack their bags, and head home.

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