These days, images of the Mott Haven neighborhood in the South Bronx tend to showcase either gleaming new buildings or still-warm bullet casings framed by police tape. Stories often dwell on the gentrifying neighborhood’s property sales or the latest murder in the 40th precinct.
With coverage like that, it’s easy to forget that people live, love and grow up there.
In “Haven,” the photographer Sarah Blesener looks beyond the headlines, capturing a group of neighborhood boys coming of age. Her images defy the one-dimensional stereotype of “young boys in the Bronx.” No gang signs or bandanas, no flashing of guns, no clutched Hennessy bottles or blunts. Just kids.
Kids who cram into their mothers’ couches and text, who sit on each other’s beds like it’s their own, who spot each other a few quarters for chips and soda, who get nervous talking to their crush. They live in housing projects within walking distance of each other. Members of their family have been incarcerated, and they live in fear of being arrested themselves, as well as being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Their demeanors balance maturity and boyishness in a way those who live outside their neighborhood don’t necessarily get.
Ms. Blesener was born and raised in Minnesota and has only spent a few years in New York. One day, she was shooting a portrait of Chavi, 14, the first boy in the group she met through a friend at ICP, where she is a student. Chavi dreams of being a bachata star like another Bronx kid done good, Romeo Santos. After releasing a new single and asking Ms. Blesener for a portrait, she suggested they go up to a rooftop to get a panorama of the Bronx. Chavi was nervous, and after a few shots, asked to go back downstairs. Ms. Blesener didn’t understand why. He spelled it out for her: She can afford to get into trouble, he told her, but he can’t. “It really sucks that he has to be so aware of that at such a young age,” she said.
There are other things Chavi and his boys are aware of, too, like their neighborhood changing almost daily with expensive apartments, new cafes, restaurants and galleries. “They are all afraid of being left behind,” said Ms. Blesener, who recounted how she’d often make the walk with them down Third Avenue, and they’d stop and point out signs of gentrification: new businesses, shuttered ones, unfamiliar faces. In one photograph, they play softball in a field not far from Yankee Stadium. Behind them, a new construction project looms.
When Ms. Blesener met Chavi and his four friends as freshmen in high school, they were so shy they’d barely swear around her. Then she spent time with them, met their families and their girlfriends and they opened up. They are juniors now, experiencing their first breakups, their voices changing, and the feeling of being too cool to talk to anyone as openly as they once did.
Ms. Blesener said she plans to continue to photograph the boys until they are seniors in high school. The culmination, she hopes, will paint a different image of what it means to grow up in a neighborhood like Mott Haven.
“There’s nothing but bad statements about the place, especially when it comes to teenagers,” she said. “But these kids are really set on defying that. They don’t want to be put in those types of boxes.”
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