LIL' BROS ON PHOTOGRAPHS - MARTIQ

Young Polish photographer, MARTIQ, in a prefatory note to his hardcover book of black & white photographs, remarks that his subject (early to late teen boys) enthalled his attention for five years. "What fascinated me so much were the hundreds of life stories I saw in my models' eyes." In particular, he was drawn to to the overlappings and contradictions of childlike innocence and manlike maturity that mark adolescence: a time when boys "love deeper and suffer harder" than girls. Of Marti's studio photographs of boys, Anderzej Smoczynksi observes that it uplifts by "subtraction not addition," that it rejects "coquetry and pose," that its variety is "unified by vision," and, "most importantly, these photographs are simply true."