IT'S COMPLICATED: the American teenager
Portraits and interviews by
Robin Bowman
Robin Bowman
extended to the end of June, 2012
Opening reception and book signing: Friday, May 18tht 6-9 pm
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.”
