The American Teenager
The American Teenager
Robin Bowman's five-year journey into the heart of teenage America created a series of 419 "collaborative portraits," wherein she shares her discoveries of a generation coming of age in America. In searing and intimate contemporary photographs, presented alongside the teens' own voices of passion, pride, embarrassment, lust, dread, pain, anxiety, instability and rage, the book charts the coming of age of the largest generation ever in America, almost double the 1960s baby boomers. In her exploration, she traveled 21,731 miles to photograph teens in every region of the country and every socioeconomic group: from a Texas debutante to teenage gang members in New York City; from a drag queen in Georgia to a coal miner in West Virginia. Her intimate photographs invite individuals to look more closely at how complex challenges facing a rising generation of Americans have informed individual identities. The photographs also ask us to reconcile preconceived ideas and stereotypes of teenagers with the diversity of individuals in the portraits. The 65 million teenagers now or soon to enter high school are Gen Z, following another 82 million called Gen Y. Even now, years later, this project continues to demonstrate its relevance. Currently, in its third printing, the book and the traveling exhibition it accompanies are about the inside lives of these young people and how they see their reality.
Meet one's fellow Americans –– in the biblical phrase, "all sorts and conditions of them…with dreams and worries both, confident plans and decided apprehensions."
- Dr. Robert Coles, Harvard University, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Children of Crisis"
[Bowman's) project is truly unusual in this day and time. In terms of its depth and breadth--the documentation of a cross-section of an entire segment of the American population –– it is comparable to the Depression-era documentary work of the Farm Security Administration photographers."
- Stephen C. Pinson, Curator of Photography, New York Public Library
I am not sure who is more fortunate –– we who meet America's teenagers through Robin Bowman's engaging portraits or these young adults who have found a deeply compassionate artist.
- Elisabeth Biondi, Visual Director, The New Yorker
Robin Bowman captures the complexity, dignity and possibility of a new American generation. Spare, penetrating, and impatient with both stereotype and sentimentality, her portraits do more than document the surface trappings of young and particular lives. Instead, her camera seems to listen, and the faces she captures with it sing.
- Katherine Boo, MacArthur Fellow and Writer
A poignant study of a generation… These breathtaking portraits, not a stereotype among them, will stand as a priceless record of the faces and feelings of an age.
- David Mehegan, Boston Globe
Unburdened by any ideological baggage, Bowman's ambitious series of informal portraits is less a reflection on the triumphs and tragedies of adolescence than a reflection of the sheer diversity of American lives.
- Michael Weinstein, New City Chicago Review
[Bowman's] subjects' first-person ponderings demonstrate a thoughtfulness and awareness not ordinarily credited to America's teenagers –– qualities that transcend their diverse, often difficult experiences.
- Miki Johnson, American Photo