Hudson Bohr Photographs

hudson bohr photographs

April 27 - May 20, 2018

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Living Room Apparitions
Terah Ehigiator

Nine PM and the TV’s on—

You and I dressed in blue sitting
On the couch, eyes glazed like farm fish
Held by flashing light. Time passed.
Night spilled through our window
Carrying two slim silhouettes, wound together
Like twine dusted in coal.
Ghost children laying on our carpet.
Kelly Clarkson’s judging the Voice.
again.
Pictures etch you into absence. I am an
Easyboy. The whole room was covered in shade.
Pupils like black mirrors, flickering aquamarine.

Time passes.
a small, dark hand touches my pinkie.

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 f e e l s fa m i l i a r

Alex Jen

Hudson Bohr’s photographs linger like stray glances

and anxious flirtations, waiting to be noticed. They
remind me of tugging at your shirt in a too-hot, too-
crowded apartment party, sticking it out and waiting
for that one person who might not even show up. I hope
they come. Of quickly but shyly looking up on the bus
to confirm, yes, we just exchanged glances, but that’ll
be all. Hesitate, maybe look up again, until one of us
gets off. Bohr’s photographs hold the fragile thrill and
immediacy of an unexpected click—one second longer
in “Untitled (Thomas and Trevor)” (2017) and Trevor’s
pinky will slip or a distraction will break his partner’s
eye contact—and urge you to look longer and revel in
the warm languor of these tense but rousing nights.

In “Untitled (Mehow at the Door)” (2017), a boy with

close cut hair and one strap of his overalls dangling
off his body looks over at his friend, laughing as he
acts out a story with his hands. They’re interrupted by
Bohr’s thighs—he’s lying down and laughing with them,
squeezing the shutter right when the punch line drops.
And yet everyone is blurred except for the boy biting
his lip at the door, looking in curiously. He holds onto
his backpack strap uncertainly, confused and maybe
nervous—this and other photographs by Bohr make
you feel the social apprehension of what it’s like to be
alone around other people. You don’t know if you’ll
make friends at this party or hang back in the cor-
ner—it could go either way, really, and that’s why you
keep looking at Bohr’s photographs—waiting, hoping.

But Bohr also photographs the strange frustration of

what it’s like leaving a crowd—when you finally get

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 home, close the door, catch your breath—and suddenly
feel lonely all over again. It seems like you can’t win. In
the dimly lit kitchen of “Untitled (3F)” (2016), a roll of
paper towels unravels after being pulled too far and two
parallel light strings dangle from the ceiling like cob-
webs. Bohr photographs empty spaces to get to know
them; the things people use and leave behind, he says,
sometimes tells you more than a conversation would.

Bohr often treats the camera as an extension of his

sight and mind, selectively framing tender moments
as he walks around to reflect on his private feelings.
The resulting photographs are a continuation of the
spaces he and his friends have lived, loved and lost in
together. But they’re also an interruption of them—
stories are paused and the everyday offers up a fris-
son of excitement. Some of the photographs might be
accidents, but that’s what Bohr is after. Every pho-
tograph, he says, is an accident—a collaboration
with what just happened to happen in front of him.

“[The photographs] are accidental, but at the same time

they aren’t. The visuals are happening as an accident, but
the emotions behind them—that make people say and
do things they’re sometimes not even sure of—aren’t.”

Such quick accidents might be more easily captured

with digital photography, which is Bohr’s preferred
medium—but several of the works in Hudson Bohr:
Photographs are shot with film, from when Bohr
lived in New York from 2016 to 2017. Bohr wanted
to look more carefully before shooting, to line up a
specific moment in the viewfinder and fix it right as
it became decisive. Film not only limited the amount
of photographs Bohr could take, but also forced him

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to edit by looking, instead of checking the result
after each digital photograph. Shooting with film
sharpened his composition, as Bohr realized he liked
diagonals, and messiness—no reason to glamorize a
very real world—so long as the photograph retained
balance and allowed viewers to settle in, and wish they
were there. Now, even as Bohr has returned to digital
photography, he avoids looking at the monitor. Bohr
still makes hundreds of photographs per shoot—not
because of a careless refusal to edit, but rather because
of a willingness to show more than a precious view. To
have his subjects trust the space in front of the camera,
and to have his photographs give a glance at all the
facets of intimacy when one lets their guard down.

For Bohr, photographs often concede details never

noticed at their making. In “Untitled (Thomas and
Trevor),” there are the glasses thrown on the chair,
and the small tear in the armpit of Thomas’s shirt.
Bohr shows us the worn warmth of old habit, the
comfort of shedding stress and changing into what-
ever you want when you get home. And isn’t it the
best relief when you can let someone else into that
lazy space where you can just “be,” without think-
ing or worrying? Bohr’s photographs are then about
layered relationships—first, spending time with a
subject and making their photograph to get closer to
them. Then, spending time with a photograph and
taking care to learn its subjects’ quiet idiosyncrasies.

Out of his hundreds of photographs, there is one that

still resonates especially with Bohr—a picture of the
Hudson River, “Untitled (Hudson)” (2016). He sees it
as a self-portrait. The waves in it barely slosh, and
skeins of wrinkled grain meet at little divots in the

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 water. I think it’s funny how so many photographers
make pictures of water—Peter Hujar, Roni Horn, Zoe
Leonard, Wolfgang Tillmans—and yet, they’re all dif-
ferent. Hujar’s water looks like hot milk, greasy and
sensual; Leonard’s water feels old and wary. There’s
something about photographs of water that never
feels clichéd, and is hard to pin down at all. Some-
thing mystical. Perhaps it’s something personal, some-
thing related to how we drink it, use it, soak in it
and can never quite escape it. I don’t know what else
exactly to say about water, and neither does Bohr,
in our conversations together. Maybe that’s why he
and other photographers keep making pictures of it.

Immediately after immigrating to New Jersey from

Brazil, Bohr was asked constantly if he was named after
the Hudson River. No, his mother just liked the name.
And even with all the people and friends Bohr has come
to know, he has yet to find another Hudson in his life.

“Even though I lived by the river, I never went to it. And

one day, I was feeling weird and walked out to it, and
met Hudson for the first time. And sat there for a while.”

The resulting photograph is reminiscent of the rest of

Bohr’s work—familiar, like something you once knew
or someone you pass each day. Except now, you have an
invitation to stop, to sit, to spend time. And so we do.

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 a n i n t i m at e d i s ta n c e

Ade J. Omotosho

Loneliness has a way of cutting people off from the world,

of forcing them to occupy worlds where language is rendered
useless, or at least useful only in its capacity to be shared
with oneself. Such was the case with the twenty-three-
year-old photographer Hudson Bohr. When Bohr turned to
photography in the fall of his sophomore year in college, the
camera represented a late surge of language. Within a year
and a half, starting in the fall of 2016, Bohr made hundreds of
photographs, both off-the-cuff and for class assignments that
primarily document his life and the lives of his close queer
friends in New York. These photographs reveal the moments
when Bohr still felt the loneliness of his past, but also the pivotal
moment when it began to dissipate and he found a cohort of his
own. In his black-and-white film and digital snapshots, Bohr
shares a record of people coming together with their difference
and threading a community together out of that difference.

Bohr spent his formative years in almost complete isolation

on a sizeable farm skirted by rolling hills in the rural
municipality of Tiros, Brazil. His schizophrenic father, who
he assisted with cow handling and the regular duties of the
farm, was the only other person he lived with, but there was
a palpable distance between them, so Bohr learned to court
solitude as his closest companion. Left to his own devices, he
found little use in language or an outward expression of his
feelings and retreated to the quiet of his mind. He knew he
was gay from a young age, but in deeply Catholic Brazil where
queerness was shunned, he also knew that he’d have to keep
that recognition of who he was buried within himself. At 15,
he moved to New Jersey where he attended high school and
reunited with his mother, who had left Brazil for the United
States 10 years earlier. He spoke no English before moving to

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 the US and his efforts to learn the language forced him to be
more extroverted. After graduating, he enrolled at Williams
College in Williamstown, Massachusetts where he first began
making photographs. Small and rural, the town’s seclusion
reminded him of the farm of his youth; yet another place that
played host to loneliness. In an attempt to withdraw from
the suffocating environment and the distance he felt from
his peers, Bohr moved to New York in late May of 2016,
where his desire for the language of the camera deepened.

Before Bohr moved to New York, he never imagined that a

community like the one he came to know could ever exist.
Shut away as he was from others in his early years, the idea of
community was simply that: an idea. It seemed as though isola-
tion had followed him from that plot of land in Brazil, to New
Jersey, and then again to Williamstown. But New York was a
place that asked him to look both inward and outward so that
he might move out of his world of isolation into one of kinship.

In his initial attempts to be a part of a group Bohr often felt

like an outsider. There were bouts of self-doubt that threatened

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to draw him back onto that farm in Brazil. Bohr recalls one
such incident at a party with his friend Anaury. After feeling
intensely out of place amidst the crowd while Anaury moved
freely through the sweat and lust of the club, he fled in a rush
of anxiety, dragging with him a heavier shell of diffidence
than the one he’d entered with. He faced the realization that
the world he’d longed for might be firmly closed off to him,
real but unbreachable. Hudson was gay, to be sure, but this
was a community that felt—to a boy who often sat alone with
his difference—so sure of itself and of its queerness. He’d had
less time to accept his sexuality and understand it in relation
to others. How would he make up for that lost time? How was
he to make sense of the feeling of otherness in a community
that he supposedly belonged to? It was the first time in his life
where cleaving to people who shared his difference felt like
a possibility and he slowly began to realize a queer family of
sorts, all while coming to accept his identity in the process.

Anaury was first. After meeting on Tinder, the two quickly

became close friends. Their friendship was one that affirmed
Bohr’s humanity and encouraged him to embrace his queer-
ness. In his photographs of Anaury, Bohr presents him as the
self-confident ideal whom he admires, in part for his disre-
gard for approval—an indifference Bohr desired for himself.
In one shot, Anaury stands with a bath towel wrapped around
his waist in Bohr’s apartment. A blond wig frames his face as
he stares into the camera, his arms holding his gracile body.
Anaury’s cool expression telegraphs an irreverence that seemed
to elude Bohr for so long. It’s the look of someone committed
to the complicated task of being oneself in one’s young body.
Another image captures the tender moment of Anaury shav-
ing before a bathroom mirror. His head is thrown back as his
hand gently rests over his neck, eyes closed, as though rapt
in ecstasy. Even in group photos, like one that shows friends
dancing at a party, Anaury remains the center of our atten-
tion. He’s there in the line of friends and it’s his outstretched
hand set in a graceful gesture that announces his presence.
Bohr’s photographs taken while living in New York and
upon return visits during the subsequent school year docu-

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 ment the unpredictable shifts of time and relationships be-
tween friends as they play out over two consecutive summers.
They attest to the rapport he developed between his friends
in so little time and show people comfortable enough to re-
veal themselves to Bohr. His subjects party in bars, yards,
and apartments. Bohr appears in none of these images. It’s
just his friends sculpting a world for themselves out of the
time they share together. He’s only there behind the camera,
moving frantically among them, freezing their fun in time.
It’s an ideal remoteness for Bohr as he favors recording their
moments of togetherness by careful observation. It allows
him to assume a certain distance from his peers that he finds
significant because it can contain his ambivalent desire to
be both “everywhere and nowhere” at once. One photo of
friends shows a boy transfixed by his reflection as he stares
into a mirror, besotted with his own gaze like Narcissus. Tak-
en from behind, it shows the back of a subject’s out-of-fo-
cus head in the frame, and at just the right angle that Bohr
remains unseen. It’s his way of being present in a moment
while being simultaneously elsewhere, intimately distanced.

Photographing others is perhaps a way for Bohr to lay

claim to a sense of family that he’d never known, a way
for him to build a queer family for himself that could be
held within an image. He regrets not carrying his cam-
era with him to more outings for all the moments he could
have captured, moments that have since faded to memory.

Bohr’s record of his friends’ lives isn’t limited to those they

lead in public, but extends into those held in private, in
domestic interiors. Giving his subjects almost no direction
and allowing them to pose how they wish, he photographs
them on beds and couches. His interest in domestic space
stems from a recognition of the potential of private interiors
to tell their own story of the individuals who inhabit them. In
these photographs, he dispenses with the technical implements
of studio lighting and flash and instead uses lamps, preferring
the soft light that they provide. By using the lamps, he creates
a kind of makeshift studio environment within the room, as

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seen in photographs of his friend Teddy. One shot brings us
up to Teddy’s face, crossed by a cord belonging to the lamp
that lights the scene. That same cord drifts across Teddy’s
torso in another picture in which he stares directly into the
camera, his head resting on his arm held up by his elbow. The
beguiling intensity of his gaze is made all the more powerful
by the sight of Bohr’s knee in the right corner of the frame, a
gentle reminder of the vulnerability in drawing close to others.
Another photograph shows a shirtless Teddy in repose in a
corner of his room. A lamp missing its shade is plugged into
an outlet. It’s a messy photograph—in that it gives a sense of
its own construction—but its messiness is significant because
it accommodates and reflects the messiness of friendships.

A few of the photographed interiors are bereft of human

presence, evoking the darkest moments of adjusting to life
in a new city when Bohr felt most alone. These empty spaces
long for the company of others and for a subject to fill the
frame. A wistful image of a stairwell is crowded with shad-
ows and silence that only a fluorescent light bulb seems to
pierce. Similarly, a film photograph of Bohr’s bedroom taken
just outside of a door opens up to a mirror propped against
a wall. Reflected in the mirror is an unmade bed fit with
ruffled, white sheets holding the wrinkles left by the body
that just vacated them. Perhaps the most striking image of
this kind is a photograph taken in Teddy’s bedroom. It’s an
otherwise ordinary still life—of a house plant, an A/C, fur-
nishings—if not for the bondage harness that hangs on the
wall, resting next to a pair of long, black fisting gloves. A
pair of boots, too, are not far from the fan. All those queer
things are left there, set in relief, and commingling with all
those other things. In weaving these objects together, the im-
age suggests a normalcy of both the erotic and the queer and
of the way in which desire is entangled with the everyday.

Bohr sometimes regards his picture-making as an innocently

“selfish” act—a means for him to make a private catalog of
memories that he can recall at will (many of his friends have
never seen the photographs taken of them). But to regard his

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 photographs as selfish is to imply distance between photographer
and viewer. Their power, however, is not contained by any kind
of distance. Bohr’s life and photographs tell a story of the ways
in which we construct our identities and the experiences that
remind us that our self-constructions are not finite nor final.

In a calm self-portrait, we see a shirtless Bohr sitting on a

wide mattress as light filters into his tidy room, casting faint,
grey shadows onto the white of some shirts hanging in the
corner. Taken in the late summer of 2016, the photograph is
one of Bohr’s earliest film exposures. The cuffs of his pants
are rolled above his ankles; white socks shoot out from a pair
of Doc Martens. His elbows rest on his knees, his arms fall
between his legs. His gaze meets ours in a blank stare from
behind the clear frame of his glasses. His bare shoulders are
relaxed, as though the weight of the world has momentarily
lifted, as if the boy he’s becoming is within arm’s reach.

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titles
Front cover: Untitled (Self-Portrait). 2016. Inkjet print from negative, 10 23/32 x 15 in.
Page 4-5: Untitled (Grant). 2016. Inkjet print from negative, 10 23/32 x 15 in.
Page 9t: Untitled (Thomas and Trevor). 2017. Inkjet print from negative, 10 23/32 x 15 in.
Page 9b: Untitled (Hudson). 2016. Inkjet print from negative, 10 23/32 x 15 in.
Page 10t: Untitled (Mehow at the Door). 2017. Inkjet print from negative, 10 23/32 x 15 in.
Page 10b: Untitled (3F). 2016. Inkjet print from negative, 10 23/32 x 15 in.
Page 15: Untitled (Mehow). 2018. Inkjet print, 28 x 20 in.
Page 16-7: Untitled (Will). 2018. Inkjet print, 20 x 28 in.
Page 18: Untitled (Mehow’s Kitchen). 2017. Inkjet print, 28 x 20 in.
Page 20: Untitled (Anaury). 2016. Inkjet print from negative, 10 23/32 x 15 in.
Page 24: Untitled (Teddy). 2018. Inkjet print, 20 x 28 in.
Page 25: Untitled (My Room). 2017. Inkjet print from negative, 15 x 10 23/32 in.
Page 26: Untitled (Teddy’s Dead Dog). 2017. Inkjet print, 10 23/32 x 15 in.
Page 27: Untitled (Mehow and Me). 2017. Inkjet print, 28 x 20 in.
Page 28: Untitled (Party). 2017. Inkjet print, 28 x 20 in.
Page 29: Untitled (Teddy’s Back). 2017. Inkjet print, 28 x 20 in.
Back cover: Untitled (Teddy’s Room). 2018. Inkjet print, 28 x 20 in.

acknowledgements
Hudson Bohr: Photographs is the product of a close collaboration with Bohr, Terah
Ehigiator and Ade J. Omotosho. I am grateful for our conversations, which brought
together different considerations of the intimacies and idiosyncrasies layered in Bohr’s
photography. We hope Bohr’s deep care for his subjects comes through in this catalogue
and in the exhibition.

Hudson Bohr: Photographs would not have been possible without the trust and financial
support of Anu and Arjun Aggarwal and Susan Song, who steadily pushed this entire
exhibition forward. The essential generosity from the Williams College Art Department,
Williams College Council, Williams College Vice President for Campus Life Office and The
Davis Center helped publish this catalogue and ensure for a smooth installation. I would
like to thank Jason Hoch, whose unwavering enthusiasm helped us find an intimate space
at Cable Mills for the exhibition. I extend my gratitude to Dave Traggorth, Brenda Iacuessa
and Mark Hallock at Cable Mills for their understanding and support with logistics around
organization, installation and the opening. Special thanks go to Krista Gelev for designing
a publication that makes you want to look longer at Bohr’s photographs. My deep
appreciation goes to Zak Arctander, Darby English, Sylvie McNamara, Malcolm Moutenot
and Jason Pickleman for their editorial suggestions with writing and presentation. Most
of all, I am indebted to Hudson Bohr, whose patience and willingness to share the stories
behind his photography enabled this exhibition’s realization.

Alex Jen
Curator

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Hudson Bohr: Photographs
April 27 - May 20, 2018

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition at Cable Mills,

Williamstown, MA
Edition of 400

Poem by Terah Ehigiator

Essays by Alex Jen and Ade J. Omotosho
Design by Krista Gelev