Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents

Triphibian

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

Animats

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

ghost_of_moc

The venture capitalists all ran here.

AIorNot

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

ivansavz

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

blendo

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.

WalterBright

Yup that all looks familiar! If you want to see a realistic depiction of 1970s teens see the movie "Over The Edge". The plot is absurd, but it captured the way the teens looked and acted. Interestingly, at the time kids carried oversized combs in their pockets (including the boys). The movie is the only one I've seen where the kids carried those combs.

freetime2

Many of these kids look a lot older than high school age to me - I'd guess mid or even late twenties for some. > Retrospective aging is the perceptual illusion where people from past decades look significantly older in old photographs and videos than people of the same age do today Vsauce did an interesting video about this a while back[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjqt8T3tJIE

dmwood

Photo editor of a 1970 high school yearbook here. These are accurate reflections of MY memories too. Maybe it was a Yashica Mat I used...

BobbyTables2

One thing I noticed long ago about the boomer generation is they are likely to make small talk with random strangers in public (store clerk, waiter, etc) without much hesitation. They knew their neighbors. People today are more closed, I think they’d be less likely to do that, even as they get into middle age and past the insecurities of youth. Sex/drugs/rock-n-roll probably got a segment of the population out of its shell that otherwise wouldn’t.