When the photographer Adrienne Salinger first published her collection of portraits of teen-agers in their bedrooms, thirty years ago, the book appeared in a paperback edition from Chronicle Books and retailed for less than twenty dollars. Salinger wanted “In My Room: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms” to be seen in an art context. But she also didn’t want her work, in which she shot teens from the early eighties into the nineties, to be inaccessible to the kind of young people whose lives it portrayed—those whose worldly goods extended only to the stuffed animals, pairs of sunglasses, and posters culled from magazines displayed around them. “There are really expensive photo books of people who could not afford the book—are you kidding me? It’s messed up,” Salinger said recently. Her benchmark was another artifact of the era: she thought it should cost no more than the retail price of a CD.
Nowadays, a secondhand, first-edition copy can sell for hundreds of dollars; in August, the book will be reissued by D.A.P. as “Adrienne Salinger: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms” in an expanded, handsome hardback form, with a price tag to match. The new edition confirms the collection’s status not merely as a beautifully constructed document of its time (a counterpart of sorts to Nan Goldin’s images of young denizens of downtown New York in the late seventies and early eighties) but as an enduring work that speaks to our own moment in new and suggestive ways. Teen-agers today are the most photographed generation ever, having been snapped incessantly by their parents before graduating to selfies and Instagram in their own right. Compared with the self-curated, only partially self-disclosing pictures that are the mainstay of social media, however, Salinger’s images—many accompanied by a short text drawn from extended video interviews she conducted—have a disquieting intimacy, offering a sense of the perennial perilousness of adolescence. Danielle D., seventeen, shot in Syracuse, New York, in 1990, is pictured seated in a white wicker chair like a throne, a pair of pink ballet pointe shoes draped over a pushpin board above her bed. Dressed in a stripy T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tube socks, with fair, cascading curls and a winsome smile, she looks like a paragon of the high-school popular girl. The text on the opposite page reveals that, after a manic episode, Danielle spent thirty days in a mental hospital and was diagnosed as bipolar. In the photograph, she is on lithium.
Salinger’s subjects are drawn from various walks of life, but their generational commonalities seem more significant than their socioeconomic differences. She notes that, whatever an individual’s background, the rooms were always more or less the same size. “They are all about twelve by twelve,” Salinger says now. “And all of their world is in that space—their past, present, and future.” There is Amie D., seventeen, from Fayetteville, New York, who has a Nantucket poster on her wall and says her favorite fashion designer and career role model is Donna Karan. A few pages away is Auto C., eighteen, from Liverpool, New York, who has a tattoo of a question mark on his chest and a Betsy Ross flag graffitied with an anarchist symbol on his wall. He tells Salinger that his father hit him with a hatchet when he was nine or ten years old. His father, he says, “is smart, but not well educated. He didn’t rise above it.”
It is interesting to see how many stylistic tropes of the era recur in the rooms, which weren’t curated to cultivate anonymous likes but to serve individual tastes. Several teens have street signs on their walls, like Larry P., a seventeen-year-old student at Brigham Young University, who is pictured shirtless, holding a carved gape-mouthed wooden mask in his hand. Wood veneer is plentiful, from Washington State to Newark, New York. All the beds have crappy-looking sheets—the sort made of polyester that sends off staticky sparks in the dark. Brad S., also of Liverpool, New York, has no sheets at all, only a holey mattress and a grubby pillow. But any appearance of neglect is misleading: “I live with my dad. He’s a super-sensitive guy. . . . I’m, like, really lucky, ’cause I have a mom and a dad,” he tells Salinger. A number of the bedrooms are evidently in the attic, occupied by gangly young men—all knees—who have outgrown their containers. Given the cycles of fashion, certain kids look oddly contemporary: sixteen-year-old Kirk B., shot in Seattle, in 1984, wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt, a pair of very short drawstring shorts, and Converse basketball shoes paired with wrinkled sports socks, could have been styled by Jonathan Anderson.
Salinger would approach an interesting-looking kid in a mall or on the street and ask: might she come to their home and take their picture? (She said that she was rarely turned down. It is, perhaps, not a strategy as likely to succeed today.) Salinger stipulated that her subjects were not to tidy up their rooms before she arrived—as if. With sessions lasting several hours, her intention was to grant as much agency as possible to the teens involved, and to counter the inevitable power imbalance between herself and her subjects. She showed them Polaroids while the session was in progress, and used continuous lighting, so that the images were composed, not captured in the flash of a fleeting moment. “You have to hold still—so that makes them part of it,” she explained. “That’s part of the intensity of the focus, and the gaze.”
Her subjects confront the camera, like Andreen B., nineteen, from Cazenovia, New York, who crosses her arms in front of her chest to show off her super-long fingernails—grown the natural way, not extended with acrylic tips—and Gavin Y., who has bleached blond hair, eyes rimmed with liner, and rouged lips, and wears fingerless gloves and a beret. He tells Salinger about the five months he spent in rehab for alcohol abuse. “I always think to myself, I’m destined to end up in jail or a bum, and that’s because of my past,” he says. “Sometimes the future seems okay, but sometimes I can’t see any future.”
Another rule was that parents had to stay out of the way. Even so, their presence leaks into many of the images and interviews. Greg H., pictured at thirteen in Kirkland, Washington, in 1984, has a mural of clouds, a mobile of planet-like orbs, and a telescope, all bespeaking parental investment in cultivating a wholesome interest. Anne I., sixteen, shot in 1990, in upstate New York, sits on her bed, with a white fluffy Teddy bear by her side and wall art of Jim Morrison hanging behind her, the two aptly illustrating the tenuous cusp between childhood and adolescence. The accompanying text reveals her sense of divergence from her parents’ hopes: she drinks alcohol and takes drugs, if only as much, she insists, as everyone else her age does. “My parents say I should be thinking about my future. But I take my life as it comes,” she tells Salinger. “I want to marry a nice guy, live in a nice house. That’s the only thing I’m looking forward to.” In another of Salinger’s images, a constraint on the form that the future will take is already there: Lynne M., eighteen, shares her bedroom with her toddler daughter, whose white crib—beneath which lies a jumble of shoes and other detritus—mirrors her mother’s narrow white-metal daybed.
What appealed to Salinger about portraying people of that age, she says now, was the way in which they were so uncompromising. “When you are a teen-ager, I think, you are really clear about what your viewpoints are,” she says. “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 teen-agers much credit for having thoughts, but I was really interested in what they were talking about and thinking about.” For the new edition of the book, Salinger had to track down several of her subjects, now grown up, some with kids of their own, some no longer living. “They are people who had interesting lives,” she said, then added, “It’s just hard for me to think of them as not teen-agers.”
