Take a Dip with Troy Wise

We’ve been watching Troy Wise turn suburban backyards, high school running tracks, and even sandy beaches into nostalgia inducing images with a touch of melancholy. In Modern Hero, Wise photographed  Jonathan Ackley acting out the protagonist of our high school athletic dreams. On the gray beach of Wish You Were Here I and Wish You Were Here II, Wise took an ordinarily beautiful scene and turned it into a ponderous piece about memory and longing. Most recently, Wise took us to a suburban backyard that seemed to be ripped from the pages of a Yates novel in Neighborhood Threat.

Once again, Wise has given us a familiar scene–a swimming pool. Titled “Young Americans,” the series is thematically most similar to Modern Hero. Wise is back at work with his usual stylist, Rick Guzman, for the second issue of IA Privée Edition. We see the models in a variety of swimwear including aussieBum, Cover Male, teamm8, Budgy Smuggler and Ristefsky Macheda.

The water sparkles, the photographs are shot close to the models and we can almost feel the warmth of the sun on their skin. We can taste the chlorine in the air. There is less melancholy here than in the Wish You Were Here series and the Neighborhood Threat images. The photos here come off as simply a pleasant memory, straight from the photographer’s imagination.