Joseph Szabo: Almost Grown
Overview
Joseph Szabo established himself as a generation's most venerated documentarian of suburban, disaffected youth while teaching high school art classes in Long Island in the sixties and seventies. Almost Grown, an exhibition of work from that period through the early eighties, features a selection of the photographs Szabo began taking in the classroom before branching out to the school grounds, gaining the trust of his students and eventually photographing them at parties and on Jones Beach. These images remarkably evoke their time and place, providing a timeless and endlessly compelling look into the formative years of American youth. As Cornell Capa says in his foreward to the 1978 momgraph that lends this exhibition its title, "Szabo's camera is sharp, incisive, and young, matching his subjects. One can use many adjectives: revealing, tender, raucous, sexy, showy... in Szabo's hands, the camera is magically there, the light is always available, the moment is perceived, seen, and caught."