These portraits of young people in Juarez, made by Mark Goebel in the late 1980s, contain elements of the sublime in their balance of light and form. Anticipating at points prominent work from more than a quarter century later.
At the same time, their insistence on the clothing and affect of anonymous subjects—momentary acquaintances of the cameraman, presumably—read almost as a brutalized vision for street fashion from an alternate present. Outfits are uncannily in dialogue with current trends, evidence of style’s cyclical routes and the cross-national meanderings of culture.
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