The Last Survivor is the First Suspect is both a celebration and a requiem. The project, captured between 2005 and 2009 by photographer Nick Haymes, is a testament to a community of young friends adrift, based primarily between two distinct geographic locations: Southern California and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The book’s narrative blends a sense of joy in documenting friendships and budding bonds, with a sense of dread that ultimately culminates in a series of tragedies.
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\nHaymes’s intimate photographs are interwoven with a series of digital screenshots that Haymes identified as pivotal to this moment and that offer the viewer a secondary narrative of engagement. Social media was still relatively young, and Haymes recognized a new nodal sense of communication between these distinct groups of friends. Platforms such as MySpace, YouTube, and online chat rooms engendered a sense of community by enabling connection, while establishing new and impossible norms and expectations. Diligently collected, these various forms of communication between characters form a foreshadowing.
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\nIn the introduction to his book, Haymes describes how his camera helped him compensate for a crippling shyness he developed as a teenager. I took a camera and hid, discovering that I could be close to people again, intimate with them, without having to commit myself, he writes. To create this exhibition and publication, the artist returned to a body of images, reconstructing for himself what happened to these people. Haymes invites us here to engage in a contemporary way with this specific historical moment, where things are both different and the same in equal measure. LP Hartley opened his famous opus The Go-Between on the theme of coming of age with these words: “The past is a foreign country; you do things differently there.” The Last Survivor is the First Suspect captures this sentiment with remarkable clarity.
