Late last year, photographer Tess Petronio left her home in Paris to fly to New York, where she soon joined artist Anne Imhof’s merry band of 50 or so punky performers in Doom, Imhof’s reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the Park Avenue Armory this past February. Petronio’s primary role was to…. Well, it was left open-ended; the idea was for her to simply show up with her camera and see what happens. The resulting images—off-hours portraits of the cast, dressed in their own clothes, each navigating their own New York—can now be seen in Anne Imhof’s Doom Documented by Tess Petronio, her new book (in fact, her first book ever), published by IDEA. Despite her tender age—Petronio is 21 years old—there’s a sensitivity and maturity to her accomplished image making that sees her get under the skin (in a good way) of her subjects.
“I had written a letter to Anne very spontaneously, asking if I could intern with her—however I could be useful,” Petronio tells me one recent afternoon via Zoom from Paris. Imhof was aware of the work of Petronio, who, since her teens, had been documenting the daily lives of her friends in pictures, graced with a closeness and casual immediacy, posted on Instagram. Imhof invited her to come meet her in Berlin, and before she knew it, Petronio was off to America to begin work. “I had no linear perspective on how I was going to enter Anne’s world,” she says, “other than to be there for three months during the preparation for the show and to record the process.”
Arriving in New York, Petronio was struck, she says, by how “the city is on a different scale, the Armory is a different scale, and I had never seen a performance brought together and carried by a strong woman.” Gradually, an unspoken brief emerged: that Petronio would do a series of character studies of the cast while she herself was processing her own experiences of being there and taking part. (Petronio was onstage every night, projecting her view of the proceedings via a theatrical Jumbotron.) “I studied a lot of Anne’s work in art school, and she was someone whose work I found so inspiring—the authenticity, the freedom, and the scale of it all,” she said. “It’s so impressive when you’re in school and going through the process of learning.”
Doom’s central idea is the story of Romeo and Juliet in reverse order—from death to first kiss—via the rites of the American high school. Throughout its sprawling, three-hour-plus performance, the audience is invited to hang out, observe, retreat, and come back to it; this theatrical upending of narrative order blurs the lines between the watchers and the watched. Similarly, Petronio was navigating her own relationship with how to view and interact with her fellow cast members, including artist and Demna muse Eliza Douglas, musician Lia Wang (who performs as Lia Lia), actor Casper Von Bülow, skaters Efron Danzig and Akobi Williams, and model Jakob Eilinghoff, many of whom had decamped from Berlin to take part.
“We all bonded and became friends, and they’re documentary images, but they’re also staged to a degree,” Petronio said. “Anne really wanted me to capture the essence of these youthful kids, my generation of kids, between shows and after-hours and in diners—to explore what the American dream means to Europeans, I guess.” (Petronio laughed when she mentioned diners, having gotten her introduction to the disappearing world of BLTs and laminated menus the size of thesauruses here.) “And in the process of making these pictures, I had to realize myself—to have the realization of myself—to be able to shoot these interesting, creative characters.”
It’s this that makes Petronio’s images in her debut publication so magical; they’re the work of a young woman who’s stretching the boundaries of her life and capturing how a whole new world is unfolding around her. Petronio might have trained her camera on the cast, but her images—characterized by a gentle, humorous intimacy—also say so much about her and the bonds she created with her fellow Doom-ers. “I let myself be taken into their world, and it can be complicated to do that, because being a photographer, there can be this kind of dominant role. And it can be hard as a young person to feel you have the legitimacy to photograph someone. So I tend to be very interested in the person, aligning with them.”
Petronio would hang out with the cast when they weren’t performing, in lockstep with their lives away from the stage. She walked around the farthest reaches of the West Village with Douglas when the latter had a rotten cold; she captured Von Bülow at the exact moment when he was half out of his fuzzy bear costume, telling Petronio he needed a minute to text on his phone, which resulted in one of the book’s best images. (Petronio cleverly contrasts it with a comparatively more formal portrait.) She shot Doom’s resident tattoo artist, Dean Violante, as he himself was being tattooed. Everyone in the cast, Petronio included, was tattooed; hers, on the middle finger of her left hand, says “mom”—a thank-you, perhaps, for all of her mother’s encouragement for her photography. Petronio comes from a deeply creative family: Her dad is an art director and editor; her mom is a stylist and art director who gave Petronio a camera when she was a mere year old to shoot. (Petronio was recently sent those first pictures of hers by her mother. “Everything is shot from the perspective of…. I mean, I don’t know how tall you are when you’re one, but you’re pretty short!” Petronio said, laughing.)
With the publication of the book, Petronio can really appreciate what it meant to be trusted as an artist without having any expectation placed on her shoulders. “Anne has this beautiful way of letting people be themselves,” she said, “of empowering them to feel confident. She gave me the power to move when I didn’t know how to, and that’s precious. She makes you feel certain about what you’re doing, to trust yourself.” That’s been of lasting impact for Petronio. “It was the first time I realized I enjoyed photography and that it was a choice of mine to pursue photography—I’d been unsure before. And it was the first time that I realized that even if it’s an art form, you should be able to have fun, and explore, and not pressure yourself. Working with Anne, being in New York…. I learned about the freedom of creation.”