The Locusts • A book by Jesse Lenz

The Locusts is one of those photobooks where images speak for themselves. They do not need captions or accompanying texts. They do not need to be clarified. Well, if you wanted to analyze the book from a rational point of view, you would find all the answers on the last page, where a quote by Frederick Buechner states “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” A few inches below, a small quote by Jesse Lenz specifies “for my children.”Indeed, the first major monograph by photographer and publisher Jesse Lenz, published by Charcoal Press, portrays his children immersed in the rural setting of Ohio and depicts a world made of contradictions, where brokenness and imperfection of life are rendered through vanishing black and white images.But there’s nothing rational in this work, except for the awareness of accepting life for what it is, a temporal gap that extends between birth and death. And so if I were you I wouldn’t immediately jump to the last page to look for an answer or an explanation. This work is like a dream, and dreams don’t need to be explained—don’t believe anyone who tries to. They just need to be experienced—and accepted.In these images, children run wild in fields, build forts in the attic, and fall asleep surrounded by lightsabers and superheroes, creating a brooding landscape where dichotomies of nature play out in front of Lenz’s growing family. The backyard becomes a labyrinth of passages as the children experience the cycles of birth and death in the changing seasons. We take part in this exploration of the world as observers, intruders who dig into memories that do not belong to us.The Locusts fits into the context of a long tradition of photographic projects about family, and a skeptical reader may be wondering if we really needed another one. But looking closer… are we really sure that The Locusts is a book about family? As the author himself suggests at the end of the book, this is not really a work on his children, but for his children. Lenz didn’t make a photographic project about family, he wrote a letter—without using a single word—about the dichotomy life is made of. A letter for his children, and for himself. And also for us, or at least for those who are not compulsively trying to decode the enigmatic nature of dreams and memories. Jesse Lenz speaks about the project, and his vision of life, in this long and heartfelt interview. Alert: you might get…

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Source: vogue.it