The Teen Portraits That Captivated Sofia Coppola
Joseph Szabo's photographs of high school students in 1970s and 1980s Long Island capture a raw, unselfconscious adolescence. Collected in the new book American Teen, published by Sofia Coppola's imprint Important Flowers, these black-and-white images show teenagers hanging out, smoking, and simply being present—before Instagram, AI, and TikTok turned everyone into their own curator. Coppola admires how Szabo's subjects feel comfortable, never intruded upon.
He captures not just what it looks like to be that confusing age, but what it felt like in a pre-filter-polished world before Instagram, AI, and TikTok, all these contemporary mirrors that define you through algorithms with every glance.