The New Yorker:

Adrienne Salinger’s cult photography book from the nineties makes a comeback.

By Rebecca Mead

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.

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