When I was teaching art in high school, there were a number of times over the years that I recognized a student's work as evincing mature artistic intent—honesty, true observation, sincere feeling, serious engagement with its subject, facility with its medium, clarity in its design. But one photograph by one particular student captured me with its portrayal of a culture flourishing unseen around me. Confounding—that a student who could produce such an image seldom came to class, wasn’t interested.

J was into making movies, the reason he gave for his waning interest in photography. Then show me stills from your movies. Just let me see what you are doing!

The singular piece, the one I can't forget, shows a crowd of students gathered in someone's backyard in the local neighborhood, the familiar boxy row houses clearly visible in the background. In the foreground: a fight between two boys, a match not a fistfight—both wield boxing gloves which appear to be almost the size of their heads. One boy, shown from the chest up, slightly to the right of center in the image, has penetrated the defensively raised gloves of the other, whose face is a blur in the left foreground. The film still freezes the punch landing squarely on his left cheek. The punched boy, might it be J himself? Behind the boxers are arrayed at least nine spectators, girls and boys, some hidden behind the action, some standing on chairs to get a better look. Three of them are recording the fight on cell phones and a fourth is talking languidly on his phone, as if to say that this fight, whether sport or a score to settle, were nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that merited one's full attention.

The image jarringly called forth something I felt about my own teenage years: the going along, the pretense of cool, the fun that wasn't fun, the friends who weren't friends, risks registering only as shadows on the periphery. And then some of this was different—the filtering of experience through the phone camera and the inurement to physical violence. Had I been at this gathering, I would have left it behind like most of what happened to me—what I did in my high school years. Maybe the kids in J’s movie, themselves no longer kids, have forgotten that afternoon, too.