The Teen Portraits That Captivated Sofia Coppola
Joseph Szabo's photographs of high school students in 1970s and 1980s Long Island capture a raw, unselfconscious adolescence. Collected in the new book American Teen, published by Sofia Coppola's imprint Important Flowers, these black-and-white images show teenagers hanging out, smoking, and simply being present—before Instagram, AI, and TikTok turned everyone into their own curator. Coppola admires how Szabo's subjects feel comfortable, never intruded upon.
He captures not just what it looks like to be that confusing age, but what it felt like in a pre-filter-polished world before Instagram, AI, and TikTok, all these contemporary mirrors that define you through algorithms with every glance.
- 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.
- 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].
- 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.
- ivansavz
Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/jF2dj
- Triphibian
When that Dinosaur Jr. album cover showed up it made so much sense.