Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents

(newyorker.com)

45 points | by prismatic 2 hours ago

5 comments

  • ivansavz 30 minutes ago
    Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/jF2dj
  • Triphibian 2 hours ago
    When that Dinosaur Jr. album cover showed up it made so much sense.
  • Animats 53 minutes ago
    Ah, yes, the 1970s, before the invention of color film.
    • blacksqr 32 minutes 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.

    • jamesgill 6 minutes 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.

    • the__alchemist 12 minutes 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?
    • browningstreet 51 minutes 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"

      • kurthr 29 minutes ago
        Color Polaroids came out in the mid 60s. Color SX-70s were commonplace in the 70s.
        • GuinansEyebrows 25 minutes 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.
      • anschwa 48 minutes ago
        You can develop color at home too, it's pretty much the same process and effort but with different chemicals.
        • Animats 39 minutes ago
          Not for Kodachrome, which was good but is dead due to the complexity of processing.
          • abcd_f 22 minutes 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.
  • ghost_of_moc 53 minutes ago
    The venture capitalists all ran here.
  • AIorNot 38 minutes 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 24 minutes 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 11 minutes 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.

    • xp84 21 minutes 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.