Teenage Graceland

JOSEPH SZABO CAPTURES ADOLESCENTS' SECRET WORLD

It is often said that youth is wasted on the young, but Joseph Szabo's remarkable photographs of that brief span between puberty and baby adulthood seek another determination. As art teacher (and yearbook photo adviser) to the students of Long Island's Malverne High in the 70s and 80s, Szabo had the opportunity to document the confidential moments of adolescence from which most adults are barred. The results, collected in Teenage, out this fall from Greybull Press, show with naturalism the fulsomeness of boys and girls doing most—but not all—of the things teenagers do in their own element. "I wanted to understand, to get closer to them, and create a document that would show others what the world of teenagers was about," he explains. "And it was the camera that helped me to understand." With a refreshing absence of judgment or need to advance an agenda—he betrays no compulsion to expose a dark side—Szabo's pictures capture his students in the tenderest of moments, acting out their coalescing characters and responding to hormonal chaos in an era when teenagedom was less overtly commodified. Szabo's best-known picture, of a young girl on a beach smoking a cigarette, was used for the cover of Dinosaur Jr.'s album Green Mind and remains a signal image. "It says so much about the toughness and vulnerability of teenagers."

EDWARD HELMORE