"Graduation Couples": Elegant and awkward

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week - a series of "Prom Couples" by photographer Rick Ashley, for which he shot almost three dozen funny portraits of graduates from the school of his native town of Marblehead, Massachusetts.

I shot this photo project from 2006 to 2009. Being engaged in commercial photography for thirty years, I have always asked people to look at the camera in a certain way. In the mid-90s, I conducted a small experiment and took a series of portraits on a large-format camera: I did not give any instructions to the heroes of that shooting - I just left them in front of the camera for a rather long period of time, such that they were already nervous and did not know where put it, and then photographed without warning. I acted a bit differently with “Prom Couples”: I fished out graduates, asked them to stand at the mark on the floor and immediately took pictures. The result was individual and group portraits reflecting the characters of these young people, because they posed without my instructions and even without meetings among themselves.

I managed to get to school for the first time when my daughter had a graduation. The school administration, delighted with the honesty and expressiveness of the images in the series, allowed me to continue the project in the next two years. The photos were well received by the professional community - I showed "Prom Couples" in the galleries of Boston and San Francisco. And to those students who wanted to get their photos, I distributed them. Once a portrait of my daughter was asked to me even by a teacher from the school where I was shooting.

Recently the project was published on LensCulture.com, and this also sparked interest in it. Now I am working on a series of portraits of my brother-in-law, Michael, he is 50 and he has Down syndrome. These photos, in my opinion, challenge the prejudice with which we treat others.