teenagers on TIME magazine's LIGHTBOX

 LIGHTBOX  - TIME magazine 's photo tumblr has picked up on our show - congratulations Robin!

Izi Schunick, age 18

CAMBRIDGE, MARYLAND

Peer pressure is the hardest thing about being a teenager, Some people might say that I’m the peer pressure one… when I was younger I was like, “Come on let’s do this, let’s go do this.” Now that I’ve gotten older everybody’s into more drugs and everything. And they’re like, “Come on,” and I’m like, why did I do that when I was younger, make people do something they didn’t want to do?

Like with Ecstasy, I didn’t want to do it at first ‘cause I heard it could kill you and everything, but my friend she did ‘em and she was like, “Come on, ya got to do ‘em.” So I did. I’ve snorted heroin (that made me feel really bad), snorted Ritalin, done coke for like three months nonstop. And then I realized I needed to stop–I made myself stop. There’s one drug I will do again and that’s acid. I love that drug.

I’d say my fantasy future life is like everybody else’s. Have a big house, lots of cars, be able to just stop everything I’m doing and take a cruise for like a whole year, around the world or something. 

In reality, in the future I’ll probably have a steady job, probably have my own apartment but things will probably be very, very ghetto. Like, how we describe ghetto here is Oodles of Noodles. You have Oodles of Noodles and Kool Aid. That’s it, that’s about all. This is just how it sets in around here. If you stay here, you know for a fact, coming from where I grew up you will have a ghetto apartment..

The biggest thing that changed my life was when I dropped out of school in tenth grade… If I was in school it would be so much easier to get into college and get the grants and the scholarships; so much easier than now. 

© Robin Bowman

Text excerpt from pg. 124; It’s Complicated: The American Teenager/Umbrage Editions

NEW SHOW at spring

IT'S COMPLICATED: the American teenager

Portraits and interviews by 
Robin Bowman

extended to the end of June, 2012 
Opening reception and book signing: Friday, May 18tht    6-9 pm

spring is pleased to present IT'S COMPLICATED: The American Teenager - an exhibition of selected photographs and interviews from Robin Bowman’s highly acclaimed project.

click on image to enlarge

In July of 2001, Robin Bowman set out on the first of eight car trips that would eventually take place over five years. She drove 21,731 miles across the nation, met thousands of people, and formally photographed and interviewed 419 teenagers. These searing and intimate contemporary photographs, presented alongside the young people’s own voices of passion, pride, embarrassment, lust, dread, pain, anxiety, instability and rage, are drawn together in her award-winning book It’s Complicated: The American Teenager which charts the coming of age of the largest generation in U.S. history.

The book was honored as the Best Photography Book of 2008 by the Independent Book Publishers Awards and was named as one of the top ten books for young people by YALSA, a division of the American Library Association. The project was featured on The Today Show, NPR’s “All Things Considered”, Channel One News, The Boston Globe, and excerpted in Photo District News. The New York Public Library purchased the entire collection of portraits and transcripts in 2008 and Stephen Pinson, curator of photography at the NYPL, compared Bowman’s collection to the Depression Era documentary work of the legendary WPA and FSA. MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer-prize winning author Kate Boo writes that Bowman’s “camera seems to listen, and the faces she captures with it sing.”