A Midwestern High Schooler’s Intimate, Imperfect Portrait of Adolescence | The New Yorker

Far more affection than angst figures in the adolescent wasteland where the eighteen-year-old photographer Colin Combs portrays his friends, most of them high-school seniors from Dayton, Ohio. Combs’s home town is sometimes called the heroin capital of the United States. His mother, a respiratory therapist, has stories of patients who have overdosed or suffered from trafficking; his father, a car salesman, speaks warily of a gas station near his workplace that attracts opioid addicts. “It’s pretty much everywhere,” Combs said. But he has no interest in succumbing to the specious glory of drugs. In his vivid, unvarnished stills, Dayton instead assumes a melancholy splendor, sheltering artists and skaters whose insouciant dignity resists the clichés that accrue to youth.