Cult classic ‘Teenagers in Their Bedrooms’ captures the angst of being a teen

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Adrienne Salinger would approach girls in line for the toilet at shopping malls across America, and ask if she could photograph them in their bedrooms.

‘Think of that! Now, can you imagine?’ she asks when we catch up over Zoom. ‘I would then spend a long time in there, wow. And of course I've met their parents. And the only rule I had was that you can't clean your room. I wanted it to be who they are.’

The results were published in 1995 as the photography book Teenagers in Their Bedrooms, which quickly achieved cult status. The title has now been republished, as an expanded version including additional photographs, and the images hold the same power as they did three decades ago.

Salinger loved the experience. ‘I was just really interested in what [the subjects] thought about things,’ she says. ‘Because when you're a teenager, you have a clarity about your life that only starts to dissolve as you get older, when you have to compromise. You don't have to when you're a teenager, because you're not paying the utility bill, or renting. You don't have to have a job. You haven't started. We're supposed to be having a great time, but really, we're not. So even though they changed their mind a lot, I respected their point of view. And every single person is so different.’

The photographs capture private sanctuaries. Surrounded by posters, books, accessories and clutter, the teenagers are poised between adulthood and vulnerability, in a mish-mash of taste, personality and comfort.

Salinger wanted to be true to her subjects. She chose to use continuous lighting – where the likely results of the shoot are very transparent for the sitter – rather than strobe flashes, which give the photographer a lot of creative control, but can feel more aggressive and, she felt, ‘could have reduced the person’. She adds, ‘There's no such thing as a pure collaboration if you have the camera – I have the power, which I would explain to them. [But] I couldn't rip them off. And I wanted them to confront the viewer and stare into the lens, because then they have some power, some agency.’

Salinger got to know the teenagers she photographed, talking to them for hours and hearing their secrets. ‘Teenagers especially have a very bad reputation,’ she adds. ‘They're quite hard done by and dismissed quite a lot. So maybe it was nice for them as well to have someone seeing them and spending time with them.’

Teenagers in Their Bedrooms by Adrienne Salinger is published by DAP and available from amazon.co.uk, £29.75