Mike Kelley is a well known photographer. Many of his works have become high profile and have been widely talked about. Some of his most prevalent works are; The Banana Man, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, Pay For Your Pleasure,Ahh…Youth!, Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. The works that I want to many focus on and look at in my project are from the Ahh…Youth collection.

Ahh…Youth! is a group of eight Cibachrome prints of mug-shot photographs, seven showing stuffed and knitted animals, and the eighth a youthful, harshly lit image of Kelley himself, taken from a high school yearbook. The seemingly innocent children’s toys are framed in such a way as to impart a sense of deviousness to each, while Kelley – well turned out with a buttoned collar and his long hair brushed neatly backwards – appears at once impish and awkward.

The inclusion of his own image amongst soiled toys is, in part, an act of “self-caricature,” as the artist, critic, and friend of Kelley’s, John Miller, has suggested. At the same time, Kelley stares menacingly outwards as if to provoke the viewer. The resonance of “youth” in the work’s title is, as in many of Kelley’s works, left up to his audience to fathom. As Miller has explained, “(Kelley) considered art to be primarily a belief system in which viewers will make of artwork what they will.” But here, with the clash between infant playthings and the disaffected and awkward adolescent laid bare, “youth” becomes somehow euphemistic, conjuring everything from boyish tomfoolery to channelled aggression and teenage sexual awakening.

In 1992, the experimental rock band, Sonic Youth, used one of Kelley’s thrift-store soft-toy portraits from Ahh…Youth! for the cover of their album, Dirty. This helped to establish the work’s place in the canon of Kelley’s best-known creations, while the album’s title nudged the possibly sinister subtext of the work a little further into the light.

8 Silver Dye-Bleach Photographs – Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts