There’s never been an easier time to watch yourself age. Your phone reminds you where you were three summers ago, apps surface the first song you played in 2020, your camera roll stitches together the most mundane of evenings. Every platform now functions as its own archive, constantly feeding your past back to you in real time to leave us hungover on nostalgia.

Fast!, the latest photobook from youth culture photographers Chus&Greg, captures the familiar ache of time passing. Spanning London, Paris, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Madrid and Tokyo, the project documents the stage of life that arrives just after adolescence, what the pair describe as “that moment right after teenagehood – when things are shifting, but nothing is fully defined yet”, they explain, describing a moment defined by the desire to hold onto it while still living it.

The project is framed with a poetic passage written by the photographers themselves: “When I was young, there were two things I wanted to do. One was to find a place with no before or after, a place where nothing ever happens, just like heaven. The second thing was to discover a tasty and lasting flavour, high, sweet and shocking red, like a cherry on top, and to celebrate it with the ultimate toast,” they write. “Now I’ve grown up, and a third concern frightens me: to leave the freckles behind and search in your eyes for the idea of you. Oh, I am such a bore.”

Across the book, that sense of longing takes shape through a series of intimate portraits of young people from a mix of creative industries. “Some make music, some design clothes, others are artists, students or already working,” the pair explain. “What connects all of them is that they’ve already started building something for themselves in some way.” In Fast!, they appear across different cities, living parallel lives within the same gap of time. Some spark cigarettes, smoke pooling around their faces, others run through empty streets or hunch over tables with friends.

Youth culture has long sat at the centre of Chus&Greg’s work; their previous project Brighteens focused on the moodier subcultures found within the seaside haven. Fast! shifts away from teenagehood itself towards the instability that follows it. “To us, youth is not just an age category, it’s a transition between dependence and responsibility, imagination and reality, vulnerability and strength,” they explain. “This dichotomy and tension is what make this period of time beautiful, powerful, but also difficult and often misunderstood.”

That sense of instability carries into the visual language of Fast!, where the pair mix digital photography with handycam footage to create images that feel suspended mid-motion. “It feels immediate, almost like a memory or a screenshot of time passing,” they say. The sequencing, assembled alongside creative director Patrick Rémy, mirrors that looseness. The project collages shots of a polystyrene cup of filter coffee beside a hazy image of friends on a sofa, followed by a close-up portrait, arranged with the same fragmented logic of a camera roll.

One of the project’s strongest visual references comes from cine quinqui, the Spanish film movement of the late 70s and early 80s that centred on working-class youth, street life and delinquency during Spain’s transition out of Franco’s dictatorship. “These films became important because they captured a raw, chaotic side of Spanish society that had long been hidden or censored,” the photographers explain. While Fast! exists within a different social context, traces of that influence remain in its visuals. “We were interested in borrowing some of that visual language. That rawness, the sense of chaos, and the mix between staged moments and realism.”

The book closes with lyrics from 1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins, a track Chus&Greg describe as “the soundtrack of our youth”. It’s a fitting ending for a project preoccupied with the ordinary moments that only gain significance when looking back on them. “All these ordinary nights, aimless drives and friendships of youth are not meaningless pauses before “real life”, say the pair. “They were real life, and when you realise it, it’s already gone.”

Fast! launches at Climax bookson Thursday 28th May.