Photograph: 11 Boys, Queens, NY 2003, Katie Murray

I’ve been to this spot, it is near where one of my best friends lived in Howard Beach, New York. Her dad was in jail and her mom made us laugh. We were both Italian and liked pizza. When we were together it would often rain, we’d buy magazines and order Chinese. She showed me Broadway musicals, we danced and sang. We’d frequent the pictured overgrown park by Old Mill Creek which eventually bled out into Jamaica Bay. She’d rollerblade and pull me sitting on a skateboard. Down the street, hanging onto a long sheet, balancing on the grip tape with my sneakers tucked against my jeans. It was inefficient.

Along the sand, we’d find a graveyard of prehistoric horseshoe crabs and coconuts cracked and leaking juice. We’d grab the tails of the belly-up crustaceans and place them back into the lagoon, their legs dancing. We ceased conversation, lulled by the lapping water. Fingering the edges of ocean-worn blue and green glass, we’d gather the shards in our pockets and lose them by the time we got home. Our shadows grew long in the afternoon light. We stood, many times, where this blush of boys stands, but we were merely two – there was no circle. Just dark-haired girls burping garlic into the atmosphere at the water’s edge.

The stark white of t-shirts, the blindfold, and the dangling weapon, remind me of the machismo that punctuated my youth. It peppered the existence of boys and men around me. This white is a blinding, permeating reflection. This white is stuffed into my father’s closet and hidden under the shirts of boys I’ve watched undress. It is crisp, eventually turning soft, before its pit-stained coarseness is thrown away and replaced with a new pack-of-five.

The tall reeds behind the boys are native to the areas around Brooklyn and Queens that line Jamaica Bay. They are tall and swaying in my memories. They enclose spaces — keep private juvenile antics. The diversions of the boys are mysterious to me now, but would I have understood then? When I also inhabited this space? I  know in my girlish-fervor I would have searched the crew of tape-ups looking for someone to pawn over. Male-darkness had only slightly revealed itself to me and I stood on the outskirts of pulsing male energy, awaiting bidding.

Katie Murray is a distance away from the circle of boys which leaves their activity ambiguous while still hinting at its violence. She is close enough to be seen, but far enough to disassociate. This distance mimics a young girl realizing that boys play the planet differently. From the viewpoint of Murray’s camera, I feel again how I did whilst learning that fact. I yearn to approach, I itch to hold the weapon, but I am not beckoned.

There is an ache in boyish games. The blindfolded figure is up for persecution, one against many. The band of them in baggy clothes and fitted caps, tattooed with faces of Jesus and nameless women, a few brown-bagged beverages. Smooth teenage bodies, not yet calloused by work and worry. I was there, too – probably just around the bend where the sand begins.

What is about to happen is ominous and bracing. The encounter portrays the confusing state between boyhood and manhood: having something to prove, but to whom exactly? A circle of mere children navigating tall Feather Pink grass.

And yet, through the group of shadows, there is an illustration of what they all might become. Dark, taller, in similar positions, but faceless and impossible to discern. In shadow, the boy holding the white weapon’s arm has changed position. Instead of running parallel to the ground with the weight of the bludgeon and gravity, his arm is upright and connected to the shoe of the boy with the blindfold, whose shadow connects with the ringleader: the chieftain with Christ in thorns on his back, the neatest haircut, and the broadest shoulders. You can feel his family on him; you can tell he looks like someone: an older cousin or a father. They have taught him to wear Hanes underwear and Air Force Ones. When he walks away, his gait will match his stance, easy and calm. He is suddenly, undoubtedly, the one responsible for this game. He looks eerily patient, the only one aware of what might happen next.

November 28, 2018