Scene LA: The Templeton's Sympathetic Suburbia
‘The children run free in this suburban sprawl-the deformer at work on her young brain,’, reads the caption below an expressive portrait of a freckle-faced little girl.
This one stopped me in my tracks for quite some time and I couldn’t help but smile to myself. I was that kind of guileless young girl once: all toothy smiles and clumsiness, full of unbridled enthusiasm for everything always, not yet ashamed. It made me want to cry a little, a good kind of cry though. Remembrance is bittersweet, but it’s imperative. It’s how we come back to ourselves and stay grounded in what actually matters.
Ed and Deanna Templeton opened up the hometown archives for Clusterfuck, bringing together hundreds of images from over thirty years of the pair’s voracious photo-taking. The collection feels like a bruises and all scrapbook, the kind you’d flip through reminiscently with an old friend while visiting your hometown, exchanging “remember when…” stories ad nauseum. It’s a testament to the unique capacity of documentary photography to alter our collective memory, to be able to see fragments of your own lived experience or something quite like it through another’s lens. Those claustrophobic culdesacs of your past morph into something charmed as you remember all the ways that these confines served as hotbeds for subversion. The root of self discovery is not in the rules imposed upon us, but the ones we find ourselves all too inclined to break.
The Templetons display a particular reverence for adolescent unruliness and all that it entails, making precious moments out of what the general public might otherwise neglect as maudlin or inconsequential. Not a romanticization by any means, just attentive and without reservation. A timely reminder that a subject need not be pretty or sanitized to be worthy of the esteem that comes with photographic permanence. Friends brandishing homemade explosives are captured with just as much tenderness as lovers embracing and nudity is presented plainly as a fact of life, not something to be sensationalized or censored. It’s youth as raw and real as we all lived it, just a bit more cherished.
I practically clawed my way out of suburbia to get here and have hardly looked back. I grew tired of loitering in supermarket parking lots and giving myself shitty stick and pokes just to feel something. I didn’t know yet how much I’d miss the stillness or what a privilege it is to be bored, how succumbing to restlessness is like playing dead prematurely. Ed and Deanna are proof that maybe this boredom is just creative potential not yet actualized and we all have a lot to learn from their ability to harness the profundity of prosaic suburban mischief.
After some time with these images, I found myself thinking about all the long forgotten characters from my past for the first time in ages, wondering where they all wound up and wishing them well. The credence of remembrance is a simple kindness we all could probably use more of these days, and I regret that I spent so much time running away before I dared to look back at the people who shaped my once young brain. I hope to remember the face of everybody who I’ve ever loved or stirred up trouble with, past versions of myself included.
May we all take a note from the Templeton’s book of a life well lived and documented, no matter where you are or who you’re with. It all means something eventually, even if we’re too close to see it moment to moment.
