Joseph Szabo: Teenage

Joseph Szabo has a rare gift for capturing the spirit of his students at Malverne High School perched precariously between puberty and adulthood - no longer children but not quite adults. For 25 years he recorded their sensitivity, pretensions, passions and confusion in this series of extraordinary images. Some of his subjects are sweetly self-conscious whilst others are self-assured beyond their years. Szabo captures the pathological significance of clothes, the stylistic necessity of cigarettes, the heavy mascara, the convertibles, the longing, the blossoming sexuality , the confusion and the time spent just doing nothing. Szabo's work resides in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University, The International Centre of Photography and the Bibliotheque National in Paris, amongst others.