A Grandson’s Urgent Chronicle of Family Life in Small-Town Ohio

Like those iconic works, “New Paris” conjures a small society all its own. It is a world of mothers, sisters, grandfathers, cousins, and neighbors looking at us, away from us, and through us, framed by the windows, doors, picture frames, and computer screens that mediate everyday life. We watch as Schell’s cast of characters burn their trash, carpet their rooms, clean their guns, watch their televisions, walk their dogs, lead their horses, run their errands, and go about their busy days. Schell does not stage their portraits or engineer tableaux; he just captures the blur of dizzy motion as children play, the chaos of a chicken hurriedly flapping its wings, the hilarious shuffle as a seemingly headless man changes his shirt in front of two taxidermy bear heads, and—not dissimilarly—the exact instant in which a man reclining on the floor appears, chimera-like, with a dog’s head transposed on his own.

Although Schell is a digital native, he now shoots almost entirely on 35-mm. film, slowing down his practice. Instead of hundreds of attempts and outtakes, he watches and waits, trying to “honor the moment at hand.” Sometimes that makes his subjects appear as if they actively, willingly posed for him; other times, they seem wholly unaware of his camera. Often he makes use of a different kind of secrecy, photographing people who are concealed by puffs of smoke or blurs of light or smears of snow, obscurings that remind us of photography’s own limitations and the impossibility of capturing, much less conveying, the entirety of any person. Another artist might feel compelled to render death, divorce, and depression through sorrowful or saccharine poses, but “New Paris,” like the work of Larry Fink or Nick Waplington, is full of visual puns and comic confusions. A look of agony might really be a gasp of laughter; a man and his dog are touching in profile, but cheeky when shot from below, the dog’s rear end parallel to and puckered like the man’s beer belly.