NOT FORGOTTEN: CLASS OF 2020
“The bag, yes. Hold that.” The photographer shouts directions through his face mask, across the lawn, telling the 17-year-old to sling the bag of soccer balls over her shoulder as he focuses tight with the long lens he has to use now.
The team soccer balls were still in the trunk of Allie Strazzella’s car after the last practice, frozen in time when Yorktown High School shut down last month and four years of training, practices, games, heartbreak, triumph, state championships and road trips abruptly ended amid a pandemic.
Allie held the unkicked balls in front of her Arlington, Va., house Tuesday morning, posing for her senior high school portrait.
Her new one.
Sure, America’s Class of 2020 all took their senior portraits at the start of their final year of high school, glam, smiling, felt-like-a-thousand-years-ago formal photos that cost a fortune and captured kids who no longer exist.
Photographer Matt Mendelsohn saw this when he took pictures of his high school junior in the spring fling dress that would never go to a dance.
“And it was kind of melancholy,” he said, struck by the sadness he saw in an otherwise beautiful picture of his daughter.
That feeling ultimately led him on a gonzo mission to take a new set of portraits for all the seniors at his daughter’s school.
The power in the images he’s making of 500 Yorktown students isn’t what the subjects are doing in them. It’s the vivid reminder of what they’re not doing.
“There’s a sense of loss in them,” Mendelsohn said, as he unpacked his mobile studio on a suburban street for the first of 10 sessions he had scheduled that day...read
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