Abstract

I discovered photographer Richard Renaldi’s Fall River Boys series on his website (http://www.renaldi.com/portfolio/index.html) and was struck by the capacity of this body of black and white photographs to tell a story visually—minimising the use of words. Rinaldi’s photographs convincingly inform the viewer of teenage youth in a particular place, Fall River, Massachusetts—represented by urban decay, hopelessness, the power of the environment on the psyche and the general lack of any kind of bright future in this post-industrial, manufacturing town in New England. The younger boys depicted seem happy, carefree children, but the older boys portrayed seemed to take on a burden and hardness that teens from more promising backgrounds might not. This is represented both through reordering the photographs and the use of the song. I noticed that, in many of the pictures, the boys were associating themselves with a means of transport or “a way out” such as bikes, skate boards, scooters and cars. The song laments, ‘Winter turns to spring, A wounded heart will heal, but never much too soon. Yes, everything must change’. But will it for these teens caught up in circumstances beyond their control? The presentation ends with a shot of two teens working behind the counter of a fast food outlet, then fades to shots of the timeless Taunton River—nature’s conduit—both to the town of Fall River and away from it.

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