America's Youth in the photographs of schoolteacher Joseph Szabo

Joseph Szabo was a teacher, photographer and writer. He became an iconic photographer due to the fact that he photographed American teenagers from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s.

For 27 years, Szabo taught art and photography at a high school on Long Island and for more than 20 years at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. In the 1970s, the photographer was disappointed that many of his students had no interests. To try to close the gap between generations, he started photographing teenagers. His pictures have been published in two books — Almost Grown and Teenage.

Szabo captured the most important truths of teenage life, he created his art simply by paying attention to what is around us. His pictures convey the time very accurately: it seems that you literally feel the smell of cheap weed, "Bloody Mary" and a new gloss on the newly purchased vinyl of Billy Idol or KISS.