They met when they were 18 and 19. Aaron was escaping his fate as the son of the head rabbi in a tight-knit orthodox Jewish community and rebelling with gay sex and heroin. Vincent was studying art history, gender politics, and Paris Hilton. They went to raves and flea markets, rare bookstores, and Asian ice cream shops; played dress ups and wrote poems in search of their identities. They colonized abandoned parking lots, skated, and biked side-by-side, and layed on the concrete for hours eating falafels and watching the patterns in the clouds.
Aaron & Vincent is told in vignettes in their own words taken from lengthy interviews. These give unique and intimate insight into their inner thoughts during this experimental and ultimately transformative period: “Vincent saved my life,” Aaron is certain; “Aaron made me vulnerable and taught me everything about survival,” Vincent attests. Their story is also told in a series of images that follow them from their flâneuring through the streets of Montreal into their shared bedroom. Honest and emotional, these photographs may take Nan Goldin’s 20th century treatise The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and push it through a myopic keyhole to reveal a pin-up story for early 21st century relationship.
Photos by Tim Georgeson
Words by Caia Hagel
©2015
*An excerpt from Aaron & Vincent was published in Flaneur magazine’s Montreal issue.
