Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents (newyorker.com)

64 pointsby prismatic4 hours ago29 comments

blendo 43 minutes ago

High school class of 1974 here. We loved the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the 60s, but we also were keenly aware of the impermanance of the hedonistic lifestyles of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

ivansavz 2 hours ago

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/jF2dj

AIorNot 2 hours ago

Lovely pics, but no country as much as America idolizes and worships its adolescents..MTV, VH1, now instagram, tiktok and all that.. according to mass media we spend the rest 50 years of our lives trying to recapture that short youthful phase.. in reality for a lot people adolescence was a painful and thankfully short period from which you matured and and were able to appreciate adulthood.. nothing wrong with few gray hairs too

rurp 2 hours ago

Near the end of high school a teacher said something that really struck me. She said that some people would look back on their high school years as the best time of their life, while others would slam that book shut and never look back. Not the most profound statement, but it really lit up my teenage brain.

High school was a really awkward period for me that was much more stressful than enjoyable. The idea that I could choose to never return to anything like that and have a completely different rest of my life was exhilarating to contemplate.

It turned out to be true. College was much better for me than high school; finishing college and becoming an adult was better than being in school at all. Everyone has different experiences but I doubt mine is all that rare, I think a lot of people have kind of a miserable time in high school before going on to figure out a life they enjoy. This pop culture idolization of the period does seem over the top to me as well.

spijdar 2 hours ago

From my experience, it's possible to hate the high school/college years, but for them to also be comparably less terrible than what comes after, and so to look back at them with a strange kind of longing.

Like someone else in the thread said, they might have been miserable, but they had potential, options, future ambiguity. After a certain point, those narrow and solidify. A miserable past where the future wasn't set feels more glamorous than a miserable present railroaded into a miserable future.

jawilson2 2 hours ago

I'm the opposite. I LOVED high school, and miss those friends dearly. I'm 45, and it has been difficult to find people that I gel with the same way, aside from my wife (who I started dating in high school). I miss being on the basketball team and marching band. I miss many of the teachers. I miss the 90s and no cell phones, and trolling AOL message boards. I miss being able to exist without the fear of having your life recorded, either by phones or government mass surveillance. I miss when it was accepted that Nazis were the bad guys, and Canada wasn't on fire and making the air quality in Chicago horrific every summer.

College was a great experience too, and I made some great friends, but I really focused on graduating in engineering so I slowly became the party-pooper, and in grad school my wife and I moved in together, got married, so it was a completely different life experience. Now my focus is on work and getting my 3 kids into good colleges.

I sometimes dream about being in high school again, or taking my kids back with me to see what life was like pre-cell phones. I wouldn't say that high school was the best part of my life, but it is a chapter I reminisce about and wish I could revisit occasionally.

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?" - Stephen King, Stand By Me

jamesforestwest 2 hours ago

I have mixed feelings about my teenage years. I wouldn't want to go back, but I can't say that adult life has turned out to be much better, or that I don't miss that time

xp84 2 hours ago

Idk, I get it. Even as someone who hated being a teen, I’m glad that I can, with maturity, see the positives of that time period. We miss being young because we miss having so many potential options in life, having simpler feelings and opinions, and having so little actual responsibility. Like, for those of us over 40, doing homework for an hour or two a day felt like sadism and like so much pressure. But as an adult who has to figure out how to pay for rent and bills, and has to work all day most weeks of the year, I wouldn’t mind if the expectations of me were limited to learning lots of stuff for 3 seasons a year.

bena 2 hours ago

Yeah, I don't miss being a teenager, I miss that unique combination of low responsibility and high possiblity.

rectang an hour ago

"Hold onto 16 as long as you can" — John Mellencamp, "Jack and Diane"

Swizec 25 minutes ago

> short period from which you matured and and were able to appreciate adulthood

My high school and early college years were pretty rough (depression, suicidal, some substance abuse (couldn't access anything super serious)), but ho boy do I miss having time to casually build a compiler over a week of school holidays, spending all my afternoons fiddling with weird little coding things, and having zero concerns about any of it being fit for purpose or even useful and basicaly never feeling tired.

Being an adult is great but every year brings more accumulated responsibilities and that part kinda sucks. The days where I can get sucked into something interesting and forget time exists are becoming fewer and fewer. And the space of things that feel new and interesting diminishes surprisingly quickly too. The novelty wears off the more things you learn about

JumpCrisscross 13 minutes ago

> no country as much as America idolizes and worships its adolescents

Would it be accurate to say that the modern concept of adolescence is an American invention?

Triphibian 4 hours ago

When that Dinosaur Jr. album cover showed up it made so much sense.

ghost_of_moc 3 hours ago

The venture capitalists all ran here.

Animats 3 hours ago

Ah, yes, the 1970s, before the invention of color film.

browningstreet 3 hours ago

You can process and print B&W yourself. Color needs to go to a lab.

B&W is also standard for street and art photography.

You're gonna argue this _now_?

"The past is stupid"

anschwa 2 hours ago

You can develop color at home too, it's pretty much the same process and effort but with different chemicals.

Animats 2 hours ago

Not for Kodachrome, which was good but is dead due to the complexity of processing.

abcd_f 2 hours ago

Don't know if they were Kodachrome, but I still have some color Kodak slides that my dad developed at home in the late 80s.

jcynix 14 minutes ago

Definitely not Kodachrome. The process to use at home was Kodak's Ektachrome. Still much more work than the much simpler b&w processing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ektachrome

kurthr 2 hours ago

Color Polaroids came out in the mid 60s. Color SX-70s were commonplace in the 70s.

GuinansEyebrows 2 hours ago

i love instant cameras but they aren't really used for professional photography except as a novelty or as a specific artistic choice, and sx-70 isn't a particularly stable medium.

kurthr 17 minutes ago

Professionals aren't developing at home unless they have a darkroom, which were fully capable of doing color negatives in the 1970s. If you can shove color into a self-developing mobile consumer device, a professional can have it done.

Somehow this needs to be about poor constrained do-it-yourself professionals?

   You can process and print B&W yourself. Color needs to go to a lab.

The consumer "street" photography of the time was mostly Polaroids, or little tiny box cameras you had developed at a booth.

This has all to do with a feel, and I'd guess that it was mostly shot in color and converted to B&W. That's fine, but it has nothing to do with lack of choice.

blacksqr 2 hours ago

Long-term-stable color photo processing didn't become widely available until the late 1970s-early 1980s.

So if you were an artist and interested in building and maintaining a permanent portfolio, B&W was pretty much your only option.

echelon 26 minutes ago

Not to mention it looks timeless.

These people don't look ancient to me. They look like you could reach out and touch them, converse with them, share the story of their lives.

the__alchemist 2 hours ago

Could you please elaborate your thought process here? For example, are you claiming the author was using obsolete tech for one reason or another? Or making a pretentious artistic choice? Or do you think these were taken in an earlier period, then misatributed as being from the 1970s?

jamesgill 2 hours ago

In the 1970s color film/development/print cost significantly more than black and white.

Shooting in b&w was common, because it was much cheaper. But of course, he could've chosen it or aesthetic reasons.

rafram 2 hours ago

Interestingly, it's the opposite now - B&W tends to be more expensive because it has to be done by hand at most shops, while color development is done by machine.

philipallstar 2 hours ago

Fascinating to see what would now be labelled as "unrealistic female beauty standards" depicted here.