In 1972, Joseph Szabo was granted access to the secret lives of American teenagers. He was invited to their parties and summer hangouts, their homes and after school gatherings, witnessing them fall in and out of love; drink, smoke and have fun. At the time, he was an art teacher at Malverne High School, fresh out of studying photography at the Pratt Institute, and decided, as he was spending five days a week at the school anyway, he would make a study of his students. “I remember the first party that I went to, I was extremely nervous,” he says. “I thought, why am I doing this? I gotta be crazy, why am I going to a teenager’s party on a Friday night?”
But they welcomed him in, curious about Mr Szabo and his camera, who captured them getting ready for prom and socialising outside school, in parks and by the beach. Some of his work would end up featured in the yearbook while other shots wound up sitting in a cardboard box, which he labeled Teens Unpublished. It was collecting dust in his garage until art director Aude Delerue paid him a visit to go through his archive and they rediscovered the box in 2013. Ten years later, a newly published book under the same name, via Amusement Parking, threads together these never before seen images of his high school kids, growing up in their Long Island suburb. “It was great for the students because they got attention,” Joseph says. “And it was great for me because I was able to make a very unique thing about teenage life in the 70s, 80s and 90s.”
Joseph grew up in Toledo, Ohio in the early 60s, where teenage life at his Catholic school was vastly different from the suburb outside New York, where he would come to teach a decade later. These kids expressed themselves through their clothes, hairstyles and music; they were tattooed and were partying in a way he was never allowed. “I was trying to understand them,” he says. “I wanted to connect with my students, not just as a person who knew about art or photography, but as a person who was interested in them individually,” he says. “In photographing them, I got to know them, and they started to trust me and respect me, and vice versa.”
He had a few fixers, students who acted as his go-betweens and vouched for his street cred. Joseph drew inspiration from the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï that he learnt about in class. Called “the Eye of Paris” by his friend — the author Henry Miller — for his work documenting French society between the first and second world wars, Brassaï followed the lives of the artists, writers and aristocracy at ballets and operas; as well as the city’s grittier side, following prostitutes and drug addicts. “When he would go into a bar, or some shady place, the owner would give him the nod, ‘he’s okay, you know, he’s an artist, he’s going to take pictures’.” Joseph needed the same nod of acceptance from the kids.
At a house party in 1977, he immortalised Andrea on the cusp of adulthood, sitting on an armchair in what looks to be a family home with her arms wrapped around her partner or friend. She’s wearing fishnet stockings and her carefree smile is framed by white porcelain cats in the background. In 1985, he photographs a teen in her room, the posters cluttering her walls and a makeshift mirror on her desk turning it into a kind of backstage dressing room as she sips on a beer.
Some friendships stand out to the photographer, like Becky and Silke, who he captured in the late 80s looking like a pair of angsty teenage rockers with their mullets. Silke and Becky were both exchange students from overseas, and they both shared the experience of being away from home. Other images are more spontaneous and capture candid moments that he doesn’t remember the backstory to: outside, school boys mess around with girls on the bleachers, pose for disorderly prom photos or enjoy an awkward first kiss. There’s joy and excitement, as well as a relatable teenage uneasiness below their perms, slicked back hair and denim jackets.
After two decades of photographing teens coming of age, which he published in Almost Grown, Teenage and Jones Beach, Joseph had amassed an accidental fashion archive and became revered by both fashion editors and photographers of the 90s. Bruce Weber, Juergen Teller and Grace Coddington were drawn to the authenticity of his work, its grittiness and its intimacy. As the era turned away from the glossiness that came before it, photographers like him began to fill magazine pages. And in his last year of teaching in 1999, Vogue asked Joseph to photograph his high school and pick eight girls and eight boys for the editorial.
In recent years, Joseph has been reconnecting with his now-grown up former students on Facebook and looking back at the documentation of their youth together. One of his subjects, Maura, who he’s still in touch with, took over from him as a photography teacher at Malverne High School when he retired. But the unsure girl with short hair, pictured in her parents’ garden, remains: a snapshot of the period before adulthood where freedom begins to blur with responsibility.
“When you look back at your teenage years, it seems like those were the golden times, because now the world is just spinning out of control and it’s too much to take in,” Joseph says. “I wish I could go back there, but you can’t go back.” For those that were lucky enough to be his students, Joseph has preserved those memories forever.
Credits
Photography Joseph Szabo