Fall River Boys

Richard Renaldi

Charles Lane Press 2009

by

Tim Carpenter

“This whole town is lifeless/been that way all our whole lives just/work at the mill until you die/work at the mill and then you die.”

Richard Renaldi’s remarkable Fall River Boys is, for me, the visual equivalent of any of a number of sad-yet-hopeful songs by The Hold Steady. Not just because of references to dead-end mill towns (which Fall River, Massachusetts in fact is), but because Renaldi has shown us, quite piercingly, the “guys with their hot soft eyes” who are described in one song as “dependent, undisciplined, and sleeping late.”

“Undisciplined” is an apt description for most of the portrait subjects in this book. There’s a certain insouciance evident on the faces – and particularly in the body language – of the young men here, even as we viewers suspect that their blithe lack of concern will soon turn to disappointment. Tattoos and pierces (of the sort that keep one from respectable employment) abound, as do scars that appear hard-won. Whether Black, Hispanic, or white, the boys generally adopt a baggy hip-hop style – a sort of conformity played as rebellion.

The most heartbreaking of these photographs is of a guy in long silky basketball shorts and laceless high tops. He’s maybe 21, tops, and he’s pushing a stroller occupied by an infant we must assume to be his. It’s a fancy stroller, and we don’t suspect neglect, but still it’s hard to shake the feeling that this little girl is going to have a tough go of it.

The few contrasting glimpses of a more disciplined and responsible life (even if it’s just barely so) provide Fall River Boys with a narrative friction and drive that burn the book into the memory. A couple guys have jobs in a convenience store or a Pizza Hut. One is a mailman, but he wears shorts, a t-shirt, and headphones instead of a uniform. (Beautiful detail: he’s about to deliver a Vogue magazine.) Another appears to be in training for a job as a hairstylist; clipping the hair on a female plastic head and wearing a white smock, he somehow manages not to be completely emasculated.

Three photographs of boys and men in more formal clothing may point towards a way out of Fall River. In one image, the two most wonderfully dorky boys in the book are dressed in dark, slightly-ill-fitting suits, with bundles of Watchtower magazine in hand. Perhaps the Jehova’s Witnesses will provide the structure they need. But my bet is on the military. Army recruits in camos (two male and one female) stand out clearly for rigidity of both spine and purpose. Yet they are not officers; this is still blue-collar Fall River.

Renaldi fleshes out the story with a number of landscape photographs. Abandoned mills, formerly glorious homes, businesses barely scraping by, the Taunton River, all in gorgeously-printed images that compare favorably with those of the masterful George Tice. These landscapes provide a strong narrative background for the portraits in the structure of the book, yet they are too individually compelling to be considered mere background.

And all of this unified by the use of black and white, emphasizing the Fall River that no longer exists. The whole book feels to me like it was shot in late fall or winter, even though many photographs were clearly made in the summer. It provides an interesting contrast to Renaldi’s previous book, “Figure and Ground,” which was shot in color and seems to imply a brighter future, or at least some sort of mobility (as in the bus terminal photographs) for its protagonists. The boys of Fall River are, for the most part, stuck in a black and white town.

But they also seem to be sticking together. In both of his books, I’ve greatly admired Renaldi’s portraits of groups, mostly of two, three, or four people. It’s always fascinating to see how people relate to one another in photographs, particularly in ones like Renaldi’s, which take time set up because of his use of an 8x10 camera. Often, men posing in groups take care to maintain space between them. That’s certainly the case in this book, but there are notable exceptions where the machismo breaks down a bit. In some of the most affecting images in Fall River Boys, the subjects touch one another, however tentatively. Two of these stand out.

The first is of a young, typical Fall River boy leaning gently on the shoulder of a white-haired man, apparently in his 60s. The older man’s pride and dignity portend of the possibility of a decent life in Fall River. In the other photograph – fittingly, the last in the book – one young man has placed his arm around another, protectively, almost tenderly. That lyric from The Hold Steady that I opened with continues: “We'll put it back together/raise up a giant ladder/with love and trust and friends and hammers.” Like these words, Renaldi’s ending grace note offers realistic hope in tough times.