“Glouster Ohio, 2009,” by Andrew Spear. Via Verve Photo.

This is from a series of photographs of the people of Glouster, Ohio, a town in economic decline. In the post at Verve Photo, Spear describes the situation it depicts:

I was photographing a family outside their home last spring when the girl in the red dress ran by with a ferret. One of the children asked her to stop so they could look at it and I asked what was happening because she was in such a hurry. All she told me was that her Aunt had just been arrested and asked her to take care of the pet for her. She was unsure of what charges her aunt was facing.

The photograph and its explanation are marked by the acute absurdity and specificity which sometimes distinguish real events — part of what is meant by the old phrase about truth being stranger than fiction. That absurdity gives the photograph — of people who are in terrible circumstances — an aspect of quasi-comedy; when I look at it, I keep wondering if I am missing a joke. So I keep looking at the photograph, with its dreamily-saturated reds and greens, with its three unreadable gazes, and with its strong, cryptic gestures, trying to puzzle it out.

The other photographs in the series are well worth looking at. I was startled by and impressed with Spear’s use of stopped motion in the photograph of a boy jumping over a mailbox and that of a woman vomiting on the side of a road.

Normally I wouldn’t comment on something as mechanical as shutter speeds in a post at 1/125 — but then, normally I also wouldn’t bother to mention photographs of children playing or people puking, both of which are among the more coarsely manipulative types of documentary content. Spear does unusually well with both — creating in both cases scenes which are simultaneously grotesque, awkward, and beautiful.