New Granada
by Rebecca Bengal
How we waited, how we hid Like wolves, in the revolving question of a field. —Cynthia Cruz, “Twelve in Yellow Weed at the Edge”
Repeat watchers of Over the Edge will recognize the name New Granada; it’s the development the kids in the film grow up in, rebel against. And yet despite the corny constraints of the idea of a planned community, the rawness of the place is something that its identically built shoddy houses can’t mask entirely, weeds creeping in through their cracks and slowly taking over. That wildness fuels the kids’ revolutionary spirit, a primal Huck Finn declaration of freedom, or the cycles of ruin and rebirth mirror their own unease.
The characters in the stories I write exist on the fringes, trying to find their place inside a place, at war with the worlds they live in. So it’s no surprise, then, that these are the characters I’m drawn to photograph, and their places, too, and in the case of these pictures, most of them turned out to be kids and teenagers. Over the past couple years I ran into them everywhere, and almost always by accident. In Dead Horse Bay, I smelled the smoke from the fire that Brandon and his cousin built—the first they’d ever struck, they told me proudly—before I saw them, exploring the graffitied underside of a bridge. The boys in Joshua Tree appeared out of nowhere, like the green palm trees that popped suddenly into view out of that desert, an unnaturally natural cartoon oasis. They could have been from the fifties, the eighties, next year, even.
After I realized what a girl on Fire Island was reading, she turned the page and crossed her legs so you can hardly see the cover of her copy of Catcher in the Rye; I missed that moment, but she was clearly stealing hers—staying behind while her parents went down to the beach. It’s an imperfect picture, and that moment, and some others of these, are perhaps moments to recreate. Here, for now, is an early record of their first capturings. These are works in progress, these are summer pictures. Where else to find outsiders but outside? —Rebecca Bengal, 2012
COVER — Memorial Day 2 — Fort Tilden Sundown 3 — Carrie’s horse 4 — Dixie Highway 5 — Pittsburgh 6 — Big Oak 7 — Scrapey’s bike 8 — Cartoon oasis 9 — Joshua Tree, 1 10 —Joshua Tree, 2 11 —Portal to the Pacific 12 —Double Burial 13 —Atlantic Beach
14 — Catcher in the Rye read on family camping trip, Fire Island 15 — Fishing for dinner 16 — Brandon and his cousin with found slingshot, Dead Horse Bay 17 — Florida 18 — Foreign Object Lands on the Runway 19 — Untitled 20 — Skids, Burlington 21 — Secret dunes 22 — Eleanor on the fence 23 — Hudson, New York