Many—ourselves included—consider The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger a masterpiece, as well as the great coming-of-age novel of the twentieth century, capitalized for a reason. Some love its protagonist, others even come to hate him, but we challenge anyone not to find themselves in those pages: in the rebellions, the tendency toward exaggeration and lies, the nihilism, the desire to escape, and the contempt for adults that we have all experienced, at one moment or another, while passing through that cruel and wonderful age called adolescence. Others, however, even more than seventy years after the book’s publication—it dates back to 1951—have never stopped criticizing it, judging Holden Caulfield to be a character who is too spoiled, whiny, and above all unrealistic. Not representative, they say, of teenagers of his age, American or otherwise.
To them one might reply: are you really sure? The term teenager was coined in the United States, specifically by the authoritative magazine LIFE, in the 1940s, to give a social identity to young people between the ages of 13 and 19. And, more prosaically, to recognize their role—and purchasing power—within consumer society. Before then, in the United States and elsewhere, adolescence had not even really been considered: there was only the dichotomy between children and adults. But recognizing adolescence is not the same as understanding it. It remains a subject of study for sociologists and psychologists, and it has yet to be fully grasped. In fact, the more time passes and the more sophisticated the means of expression available to teenagers become, the more the mystery deepens—and what seems implausible reveals itself to be true.
It is a curious case of shared surname that the photographic book Teenagers In Their Bedrooms (1995), unanimously regarded as the most iconic work of the twentieth century on the “mysterious world” of adolescence, was created by the American photographer Adrienne Salinger (no relation to the writer) between the late 1980s and early 1990s. During that period, the photographer traveled across the United States meeting teenagers and persuading them to pose for her in their bedrooms—“sacred spaces,” often off-limits even to their own parents—where they slept, smoked in secret, studied, talked on the phone with friends, pined for love, and daydreamed. All of this took place surrounded by posters of their idols—from rock celebrities to sports stars—plush toys, records, books, and other memorabilia, creating a maximalist comfort zone that reveals their fragilities, aspirations, anger, and above all their personality far more than they would ever have been inclined to share with an adult.
The approximately 200 portraits taken by Adrienne Salinger (with a 4×5 camera and a 90mm lens, exposure time of a quarter of a second, four shots per teenager because film was expensive) and printed by her in 30×40 format all feature subjects looking directly into the lens, in a deliberate attitude of confrontation, if not outright defiance. These are assertive images that, for the first time, showed adolescents and their private habitat, inviting us to understand their complexity—or at least to try. It is no coincidence that Salinger, now a photography professor at the University of New Mexico, has recently published a new edition of Teenagers In Their Bedrooms. Over the decades, her work has not aged. On the contrary, seen in perspective, it appears even more powerful and sincere.
That same sincerity—seasoned with a healthy dose of hormones, sweat, and saliva, all hallmarks of teenage life—is also evident in another photographic book, Young Love by British photographer Ewen Spencer, born out of a reportage on teenage romance commissioned by the iconic (and now sadly defunct) magazine The Face. Like Salinger’s work, Spencer’s is in a sense nostalgic: both belong to a time before the iPhone and social media, thanks—or perhaps due—to which adolescents now overexpose themselves to the attention of their peers and the wider public, without adequate regulatory control, with explosive psychological and social consequences that are still widely debated without resolution.
Today, their bedrooms are no longer jealously guarded private spaces; instead, they have become theatrical sets that teenagers have mastered in staging, choosing to present “other” versions of themselves to the public. Versions that, paradoxically, become as unrealistic as they can sometimes be dangerous. Equally chilling in its honesty is the project that another British photographer, Philippa James, has been working on since 2022, portraying her daughter (thirteen at the start of the project) and her friends in their afternoons at home or out after school, capturing their adolescent rebellions and their conventional aesthetic of TikTok selfies, countless little hearts, brightly painted nails, rings, and Lolita-style miniskirts.
Originally conceived as a reflection on the emotional complexity of female adolescence and on what she herself describes as “those small unsettling moments that slip past you as if they were no big deal,” James’s work has evolved into a fascinating exploration of the freedom and extreme vulnerability of teenage girls as they navigate the transition from childhood to adulthood. Their desire for attention and acceptance today exposes them to sexual threats hidden within the folds of social media.
Indeed, the photographer had initially titled the project No Big Deal, but it is now set to be published as a book under a very different title: Once a Slag, a slang expression meaning “Once a slut, always a slut.” It refers to a TikTok clip that her daughter—now seventeen, like Holden Caulfield in the novel—played for her. As she explained in a recent interview with The Guardian:
«The acceptance and appropriation of that language made me feel protective and frustrated as both a mother and a feminist. It is not a comfortable title, but the shock effect is important to raise awareness about the need to protect our children’s adolescence from the violence of the algorithm.»
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