HAPPENIS: Ryan Foerster

The Ryan Foerster Show. Ryan takes photographs of his friends in ways that say much about youth, exuberance, spontaneity, trust, intimacy, openness, humour, absurdity and, yes, occasionally being ridiculously fucked-up on booze and drugs. Sitting well within a genre of photography colonized by the likes of Larry Clark and Terry Richardson, Foerster’s imagery has none of Clark’s class-based, violent darkness or Richardson’s middle-aged sexual predation of his nubile subjects. Foerster is a peer and pal of the people he photographs. Just as in John Water’s film, Pecker, about a young, earnest photographer that shoots his coterie with an innocence that, by the end of the film, has the ‘serious art world’ toasting “to the end of irony!” Foerster says only that he takes photographs because he likes his friends. His benignly chaotic scenes of bacchanalian revelry, self-endangerment, shamelessness, bodily curiosity and reckless pleasure is a testament to the unfettered freedom of being young. What is poignant about these pan-sexual, anti-authoritarian, semi-innocent rec-room and bonfire indulgences is knowing that soon enough time will (maybe) settle everyone and everything down. Caught by the flash of Foerster’s camera, naked and wasted in a pond, surrounded by laughing friends is a vivid record of the follies of youth but it is something deeper too. As Whitman writes in Song Of Myself “…I am less a reminder of Property and Qualities, and more a reminder of Life itself…”