LOST BOY SCOUT

As I’m nearing the age my father tried predicting his own future, I can’t help but feel less certainty, and more of disillusionment, within me than when I was 9. And this is echoed in my friends, and especially the men and boys I see around me, a confusing lack of purpose for a future where we will eventually be needed, but one that is just as easily ruined by our very existence.

Combining staged portraits, and typical documentary photographs, as well as pictorial images of the current American landscape, this is an attempt to portrait an increasingly complicated and by extension, more undefined ideation of modern men.

Billboards, signs, iconography seem to be the final haunting pieces of a past masculinity no longer apt for the modern-day. In the end, this project has become a portrait of the non-direction this identity can be built upon if it is drawing upon the past for this new mythology.

This project is currently in development and ongoing.

Brian Van Lau was born in 1996 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His work primarily deals with romanticism and the ability to affect memory through visual text. He focuses on topics of family, isolation, and of constructed idealism in both. His main interest in photography is its ability to serve as both evidence of reality and the simultaneous perversion of it. He is self-taught, basing much of his work in suburbia within the vallery of Issaquah, Washington, where he currently lives. His work was recently shown on Aint-Bad, Fotoroom, C-41, From Here on Out, Mull it Over, and was shortlisted for a Lucie Foundation Scholarship.

To see more of Brian’s work, check out his website: brianvanlau.com

And follow his Instagram: @zerkalou