As a young photographer in the early 1980s, what she calls the “pre-digital, largely un-air-conditioned era, when people fled the heat of their houses to hang out in their yards and on the street”, Sage Sohier would drive around near where she lived in New England, or on trips to southern states, in search of what she thought of as Americans “in their environment”. During lockdown, she went back through those negatives and contact sheets and discovered many images that she had never printed. The best of these are collected in a new book, Passing Time.
In her introduction to that book, Sohier remarks on the “kind of relaxed sensuality” revealed in those pictures: “Time moved more slowly, restlessness led to spontaneous play. Young people back then were fit and lean from running around outside with their friends and neighbours.”
This picture, taken on the street in small town Florida in 1981, is the opening image in Passing Time, and establishes not only that playful mood, but also a quickened intensity of looking that many of the photographs possess. The girl and the cat seem like fellow travellers in Sohier’s project; at street level, in a playground of their own devising among the trucks of grownup life. “I was obsessed with making the best complex pictures that I could,” Sohier writes of her younger self. “It was exciting when I came upon an interesting situation, and I loved the challenge of collaborating with strangers until something compelling emerged … Meeting people (in order to photograph them) was thrilling, and it changed me.”
You can sense some of that thrill here, preserved across the years; the girl’s eyes seem to look down the road, not only at the possibilities of that summer afternoon, but at all the afternoons stretching out ahead, until that moment was rediscovered in Sohier’s files.
