I Want to Know What Love Is, I Want You to Show Me

Troy Williams's series "I Want to Know What Love Is, I Want You to Show Me" is strongly influenced by late adolescence, a time when everything is very intense and fantasies are heroic and often based on slices of popular culture. In Williams' hyper-real images, references to 1970s and '80s television shows and movies such as ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind mix with lyrical expressions of teenage romance such as love declared in graffiti or fireworks. The title of the series is taken from lyrics to a popular 1980s ballad by the band Foreigner. With tongue-in-cheek humor, even the images Williams bases on horror films have a transparent quality that reveals the snickering hand that created them. Proclaiming the time of adolescence to be powerful, mystical, and earnest, Williams' photographs bring forth the murky stages of youth that usually end up as quasi-vivid memories of inflated heroics and passion.