Adrienne Salinger on returning to her groundbreaking photo series, Teenagers in Their Bedrooms

It’s Nice That: As a teenager, I had a bedroom like some of these photographs.

Adrienne Salinger: Do you have a picture of it?

INT: I don’t know, you’d love to see that, wouldn’t you?

AS: I would!

INT: I’m really fascinated by the design trends you can see in this series – there’s posters that are stuck diagonally on the wall and even pasted into the corners of the room. Not to mention all of the dated ephemera on the walls. What did this tell you about the subjects?

AS: I photographed over 200 teenagers, I used to see so many different types of bedrooms. On social media, people change their identities multiple times a day and reconstruct how they want to be seen without any expectation that they’re telling the truth about themselves. Teenagers back then had more expectation of privacy, people could express themselves more how they feel to the inside. No one felt the need to edit their personality.

INT: Social media could be seen as the new type of bedroom – with images as wallpaper and posters and so on. Yet, this book hasn’t lost any of its novelty, has it?

AS: You’re right, the fascination with teenagers in their bedrooms hasn’t gone away. The original book sold a lot of copies at the time, which seemed insane for an art book, and people have approached me a lot over the years about re-doing the book. It was just a matter of finding the right publisher and it just seemed like a good idea to release the unseen photos!

INT: I’m really interested in the interview element of the book. I mean, it’s just crazy to be invited into someone’s room in the first place, but these teenagers also confided in you with sensitive information. How did you create the environment for people to tell you their secrets?

AS: I’m just so curious about people. I care about what they have to say. I would meet people all over – one way was through going to the mall. If I went into the women’s restroom, there would always be girls there doing their makeup in the mirror and I’d ask them if I could photograph them in their bedrooms and they just said OK! But, I have to say, everyone thought it was weird.

INT: It kind of is, but I love it!

INT: Do you think that much has changed between the youth culture in the 80s and the youth culture now?

AS: The world isn’t really a monoculture like that. The two time periods aren’t that distinct. I’m not a nostalgic person, so I don’t really think about decades or generations and have never felt comfortable making big pronouncements. I am an artist, not a media expert. My interests are in individual people, and how they experience their lives. I went to graduate school in the mid-80s and everyone talked about post-modernism, about how we were all formed from the millions and millions of images that we’ve seen.

I tried to show this in the work – as much as one may want to stereotype these people and the time, they were still complicated individuals.

INT: I guess what a lot of people look for is simplified, nostalgic ideas of the past. Easy retrospectives.

AS: Right! And I didn’t want that. When I was young, I’d judge people by the type of music they’d listen to – and it was a way to shorthand your way through a social situation – if they wore a T-shirt of a band I didn’t like, I’d just think ‘well, they’re obviously a loserfucker’. But I think the reason why people coming of age identify so strongly with these signifiers of taste is because they’re trying to figure out what unifies their worldview in a neat package. They’re trying to figure out how they’re feeling, which they find through music, film, books and so on.

I think we all have a need to connect with others, but ultimately I think it’s impossible. I don’t think we’re ever heard or understood in the way we really need.

INT: So, how did you shoot these photos?

AS: I used a 4x5-view camera and a wide angle 90mm lens. Brands don’t matter on view cameras. I printed all the photographs myself (at that time) 30”x40”.

I allowed myself between two and four exposures for each teenager. I did this for a couple reasons. One was because I couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money on film and processing, so I had to be economical. I knew I had to make the photograph work in those exposures since I knew I wouldn’t be able to return. If I had used a 35mm camera, I don’t think I could have had the technical control – and when babies are six months old, they already know how to pose for a 35mm camera. I didn’t want people to pose in that fake way.

The shutter speed was a quarter of a second. The result was a kind of intensity of their pose. That was on purpose – to have the subject look directly into the lens, in a direct, almost confrontational way. I wanted the teenagers to have more power over the viewer. I also used Polaroids to check my lighting and to show each person what I was trying to do, so they could be part of the process. I have a lot of respect for anyone who is willing to let me into their lives.

INT: There’s a strange tragedy to these photos because we can never truly know these people enough, we can only see them through how they choose to present themselves. There’s also beauty in that detachment. The space between us and them is only a quarter of a second.

AS: Of course. When I made the photographs, it was a time in art where representation was very important. A photograph looks like a fact, but it isn’t. Photographs take hundreds of decisions that need to be made – all the way through the process. Who I am and how I act is part of the process of making a photograph. When I’m making photographs, I’m ‘creating’ the situation in some ways. I’m choosing how it will all happen. The equipment is a choice, the film, the composition, the lighting, even how the other person feels.

It was important that none of my subjects felt exploited – when you have a camera, you have the power to tell a story. You also hold power that can be misused.