Post-prom Jacuzzis, clumsy first kisses and tentative band practices: leafing through the early chapters of Martine Fougeron’s latest photo book can feel like snooping in these teenage boys’ private sanctuary. Few would assume that the person behind the lens is the protagonists’ mum.
In Nicolas & Adrien: A World With Two Sons, which binds together two interconnected bodies of work – Teen Tribe (2005-10) and The Twenties (2010-18) – Fougeron beautifully captures her sons and their assorted friends and lovers as they incrementally journey from innocence to experience at their family home in the Bronx, New York, and during holidays in the south of France.
With individual picture titles ranging from Don’t Bogart That Joint, My Friend to Dress to Get Laid Party: Adrien Getting Ready, Fougeron is without question a cool mum. Still, she long hesitated before embarking on her project.
In the early 00s, the single mother resigned from her post as a creative director in the perfume industry. “I came home late on 9/11 and Adrien told me, ‘You were the only parent not at school today.’ It hit me then that I was travelling so much and estranged from my sons.”
Shortly after, Fougeron began taking reportage portraits of them and what she describes as their highly conscious, “9/11-Facebook-Occupy-Wall-Street generation” as a way to reconnect. She also sought to produce an alternative to the dominant depiction of adolescents as invariably angst-ridden.
Initially, Nicolas wasn’t too thrilled. “Especially in your teens, you don’t want to share everything with your mother,” he tells me, sitting with his mum and brother in his gran’s living room. “And this entailed that I would share a lot more than a regular teen would.”
He overcame that initial reluctance upon observing his mother’s elaborate mise-en-scène: shooting with a large-format camera in a painterly fashion, inspired by Vermeer’s domestic interiors, worlds away from a snapshot, documentary aesthetic. Seeing the images framed as art pieces, and being given a right of veto over anything they didn’t like, also helped both sons embrace their mother’s project as something more than a mere diary of their lives. “It was a tremendous privilege and gift, even though at times it felt more like a burden,” acknowledges Nicolas.
Now a film-maker and multidisciplinary artist respectively, Nicolas and Adrien recognise how this close-knit collaboration played a foundational role in their creative pursuits. “I feel like we really started photographing together,” Adrien says, flipping through the book. “You helped me a lot with lighting,” Martine says. “Sometimes, you also had lots to say about my framing.”
Fougeron’s work is indebted to Pictures from Home, Larry Sultan’s stunning meditation on his parents ageing in Reagan-era America, which cultivates a similar ambiguity between the staged and the spontaneous. But the most striking point of comparison has to be Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a painstaking cinematic journey that took 12 years to film and which charts the young Mason’s development from inquisitive child to sharp-eyed, sensitive young man.
Like the Texan film-maker, Fougeron deftly avoids the trap of dramatic coming-of-age cliches, opting instead to highlight “in-between” events in her sons’ lives: gentler, more introspective moments, the emotional impact of which grows when viewed cumulatively. Take, for instance, Adrien holding up a phallically defaced copy of The Catcher in the Rye on the subway, or Nicolas camping out at New York’s Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. The power of Linklater and Fougeron’s far-reaching visual bildungsromans resides in their sense of uncertainty: these boys are in the process of becoming their future selves, but everything remains possible as they move through the volatile landscape of adolescence.
Mother and sons acknowledge the comparisons to Boyhood, with Nicolas adding that while Fougeron “loves a good gossip, she also wasn’t out to capture the drama in our lives”. Was she after heightened impressions of adolescence, then? “I wanted to restage what I had experienced strongly, which I also saw in them,” she explains, adding to her sons: “You guys made me discover new things, but I also recognised things I myself had lived through intensely. And when I saw those, I thought: these are photos I must take.”
Adrien alludes to the book’s “underlying sexual component,” an interesting element to consider in light of other family-themed projects by female photographers like Sally Mann or Tierney Gearon who have been criticised for depicting their children naked. Fougeron consciously avoided that perilous route. “Certainly I could have taken those types of images but I thought that would be trespassing on my sons and their friends,” she says. “To me, the overarching impression is more sweet and intimate, which is a reflection of my sons’ loving relationships with their girlfriends.”
“But that’s also what makes your work interesting,” adds Adrien. “There is sexuality in Larry Clark and Sally Mann’s photographs, but I think if you can express sexuality without nudity, that’s really powerful.”
Fougeron intends to carry on with the project well into her sons’ adult lives, albeit less intensely. “The 30s are more spaced out than the teens, so not every week,” she notes. Nicolas, who has permanently relocated to Paris, shoots me a conspiratorial look that suggests his mother’s access to her models may still need to be ironed out. “I’m just as surprised as you are.”
Nicolas & Adrien: A World With Two Sons by Martine Fougeron is published by Steidl. Fougeron’s photographic work is also featured as part of the group exhibition Catalyst: Art and Social Justice at Gracie Mansion Conservancy, New York.
