Far more affection than angst figures in the adolescent wasteland where the eighteen-year-old photographer Colin Combs portrays his friends, most of them high-school seniors from Dayton, Ohio. Combs’s home town is sometimes called the heroin capital of the United States. His mother, a respiratory therapist, has stories of patients who have overdosed or suffered from trafficking; his father, a car salesman, speaks warily of a gas station near his workplace that attracts opioid addicts. “It’s pretty much everywhere,” Combs said. But he has no interest in succumbing to the specious glory of drugs. In his vivid, unvarnished stills, Dayton instead assumes a melancholy splendor, sheltering artists and skaters whose insouciant dignity resists the clichés that accrue to youth.

Moony and unruffled, his subjects laze together in parking lots, sprint home through rainstorms, and cuddle beneath grubby duvets, doing their best to bear the work of the world. In one shot, a boy lobs what appears to be an apple into the sky, his fist raised as if in triumph, ready to punch the poor fruit as it plummets. Another image, taken beside a pool of water bluer than Barbicide, shows two friends, one behind the other in unintentionally identical poses, their hands laced behind their heads in twin trapezoids. The series—intimate, imperfect, and entropic—evinces little interest in the provocative trendiness of urban retailers or the schlocky optimism of coming-of-age tales. Like Nan Goldin’s early photography, it hews to a harsher but more beautiful reality. “We’re just trying to make art, have fun, and not feel like idiots,” Combs said, speaking of his friends.