That acidic smell of chlorine — the echoing shriek of a lifeguard’s whistle — verruca socks — swimming trunks still damp from a previous swim — beige floor tiles — locker keys worn as bracelets — communal showers — naked strangers. Charles Fréger’s water polo portraits give me nervous butterflies. They bring back memories from school, where you swam because you were told to, not because you wanted to. Your skin became your uniform and revealed a body which used to fit together OK, but now seemed a little out of whack.

Fréger’s 2002 Water Polo series marked the start of an ongoing photographic cataloguing of people and their uniforms. Like so many European photographers, such as Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Ruff and the Bechers, Fréger utilized a very rigid typological approach for his early portraits. In this case, every boy is photographed from the waist up, against the same baby blue background and under the same diffuse lighting. By photographing them separately, isolated from their teammates, Fréger forces us to look at the boys as individuals. Our attention focuses on what makes one different from the next, rather than on what unifies them.

These images expose every pore, every hair, every pimple. Water droplets form like tears, clinging to goosebumps and to the hairs on the boys’ upper lips. However, Fréger’s camera is not aggressive, cynical or mocking. Similar to August Sander’s portraits of German men and women made during the first quarter of the last century, Fréger’s images retain an honesty that simply states this is how it is. These images possess a neutrality, a respectful distance between the photographer and the photographed.

On the one hand, we are left to contemplate the adolescent form: bare hairless upper torsos with ill-fitting limbs. But, more than that, we are left with that stare: that Renaissance stare, which photography so covets. I’m reminded of Filippino Lippi’s painting, Portrait of a Youth (c.1482). Here we see a boy of a similar age also framed against blue (perhaps a coincidence, or is there something else going on here, I wonder?). Bathed in a similarly soft light and presented from the waist up, Lippi’s boy looks right back at us, with those same adolescent eyes. It’s a stare that transcends centuries, that of someone who yearns to be older than his years, not younger.

However, this stare lets slip the dichotomy between youth and adulthood, or, more precisely, between bravado and vulnerability. These boys want to be seen as men, but they are still boys. This is what unites them, more so than the fact they are teammates. Their look is as much a part of their uniform as anything else.

This dichotomy is heightened by their only visible item of material uniform: their caps. This protective headgear seems similar to that worn by fighter pilots and astronauts: macho professions, the stuff of every boy’s dreams. But there’s something about that string fastener. The way it forms that bow. It reminds me of a baby’s bonnet. It’s the kind of bow only a doting mother would tie.