A photo book featuring Syracuse teens in the ‘80s and ‘90s is making a comeback.
Adrienne Salinger’s “In My Room: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms,” originally published in 1995, shows portraits of adolescents and young adults taken over a two-year period. Like many selfies on social media today, it includes personal possessions, music posters, stuffed animals, fashion choices and private lives as art.
The New Yorker reports Salinger initially sold it as a paperback edition for less than $20 to make it affordable to the very people she was featuring. Its reputation grew over the years, though, and first-edition copies now can sell for hundreds of dollars.
Now the book is being reissued as a hardback, coffee-table-style edition titled “Adrienne Salinger: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms.” The D.A.P. release includes an introduction from former Syracuse University professor Tobias Wolff and previously unreleased photographs, as well as updated descriptions and interviews with the original subjects, as a sort of time capsule of the pre-internet era.
According to The New Yorker, Salinger approached teens in a mall or street to ask if she could take their picture as long as they didn’t clean up their rooms beforehand. Some subjects were photographed in California and other states, but many were shot in Central New York while Salinger taught at Syracuse University from 1988 to 1997.
One photo shows “Larry P.,” a 17-year-old Mormon student at Nottingham High School, who planned to attend Brigham Young University. Another shows “Melissa D.” with a Syracuse Orangemen pennant and nostalgia-inducing pictures of “The Simpsons” characters on her wall. A third image features 19-year-old “Andreen B.” showing off her long nails near a Bob Marley cloth poster in her Cazenovia home.
This image provided by D.A.P. shows the cover of “Adrienne Salinger: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms,” a photo book featuring teens in the ’80s and ’90s. Many were shot in Central New York by Adrienne Salinger, who taught at Syracuse University from 1988 to 1997.D.A.P.
Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there’s more to each person’s story. “Auto C.,” an 18-year-old from Liverpool with a Betsy Ross flag covered in an anarchy symbol, said his father hit him with a hatchet when he was 9 or 10 years old. “Danielle D,” 17, “looks like a paragon the high-school popular girl” in her Syracuse home while the text describes how she spent 30 days in a mental hospital and took lithium to treat bipolar disorder.
“When you are a teenager, I think, you are really clear about what your viewpoints are,” Salinger told the magazine. “I wanted that fierceness of having your point of view without also having to pay rent, or think about having a job, or anything. You can be certain of everything. But I think there’s a lot of truth in that certainty, and who you are, before you have to compromise. I don’t think people give teenagers much credit for having thoughts, but I was really interested in what they were talking about and thinking about.”
See a preview of some photos from the book here and at newyorker.com. You can pre-order the book on Amazon; it will be available in bookstores Aug. 12.
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Want more nostalgia? See those vintage photos of ‘90s summer fashion in CNY:
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