Soloway Gallery and curator Hadley Suter are pleased to present Song for the Young, a solo exhibition by photographer Tina Tyrell. 

Tyrell is best known for her work in the world of magazine editorials, where she has gained renown for her intimate, painterly portraits, and for her moody, cinematic fashion spreads. But all along, she has also maintained a personal practice, amassing a body of work never formally shown until now. 

This exhibition features a selection of fourteen works consisting of portraits, street photography, and still lives taken between 2013 and 2022. Tyrell explores the themes of youth and ephemerality by playing with the fundamental implication of photography itself: What you see pictured here will never happen again. And yet, it almost will. 

Each fleeting moment captured by Tyrell’s lens simultaneously hints that it is repeatable—throughout an individual’s life, throughout family generations, throughout history itself: A pair of twin portraits capturing two sisters assuming (almost) the same pose, on the same sofa, in (almost) the same clothes, nine years apart. Another pair showing Tyrell’s young daughter—not, as first glance would have you believe, a tiny, withered grandmother. The remains of a Gone With the Wind bus-stop poster, shattered on the first night of the Black Lives Matter protests in Brooklyn, May 2020. A teenage girl at a recent climate protest, inhabiting what looks like a New York street scene from a previous era of social activism.

Tyrell’s own childhood also hums throughout the show. The story of her first love—as a fourteen year old, courted by a twenty-something Hollywood actor—is alluded to in a series of haunting still lives. It is also recounted in the artist’s own words in Standard Issue (Los Angeles 1992), a zine that doubles as an exhibition catalogue. First love, too, can never be repeated—in Tyrell’s text this adage takes on a second layer of meaning, given the drastic changes since the '90s in cultural attitudes about adolescence as a time of transgression—not to mention questions of sexuality and consent. Behind the exhibition, in the back of the gallery, a video of her father taken by the artist as a five year old seems to designate her career in photography as a future foretold.