| Cute Boys in Tuxes |
R. Crumb did it best with portrait illustrations of girls from his high school yearbook, but it was a project by wunderkind photographer Brad Troemel, aka Very Young Millionaire, that got me thinking about high school crushes. That project, “Every Girl I Had A Crush On In High School” displays a no-frills-at-all succession of 24 black and white yearbook scans.  These girls’ identities are placed only within the context of the author’s admiration for them, most likely an unreciprocated feeling. They’re portraits of tragic conflicts in emotional agenda– Cupid’s misguided arrows that strike every teenager at least once. Frozen in time, these girls, who have by now become young women, are even more distant than they were at the ground zero of their implicit rejection. Back then, they couldn’t give the author what he wanted– now, all they can offer is a universally identifiable sense of nostalgia. It’s like something out of Wong Kar Wai: “At the high point of our intimacy, we were just 0.01cm from each other. I knew nothing about her. Six hours later, she fell in love with another man.” I scanned the senior portraits of some of my own missed connections. A few of them I knew, most of them I never even spoke too. All of them are presumably straight, and a couple might even come across this post, adding a whole layer of Web 2.0 self-awareness to all of these misguided adolescent notions. Anyway, as I edge towards my twentieth birthday, here are a handful of ghosts from my almost-bygone youth:
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top left one is hotness. turban dude’s alright
aw shucks– Nick G. in the top right corner. I miss him!
I swear, it is a good thing Rudy came along because otherwise you have the most ABSURD taste in men! Bottom left looks totally down’s-y. (says the girl who is almost entirely attracted to 19 year old boys who you can only barely tell are boys because they look so much like girls. we’re all absurd at some level. but jeez, man. you and very young millionaire, both. you liked some uggos.)
might I add this game I made:
http://pages.pomona.edu/%7Eae002003/
kind of obvious, but top-right is generically attractive.
but, i think you may have more of a shot with red-head, middle column-bottom row.