Adrienne Salinger: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The new edition of Salinger's ever-relevant series of 1980s and '90s teenagers in their bedrooms

Bedrooms contain the past, the present and the future; they are sites of continual transformation. Popular culture and fashion continually change and recycle. While specific objects of decor change over time, teenagers' bedrooms are still private sanctuaries: spaces for safely experimenting during a time in life when one is forming and expressing ever-evolving identities.
Upon its release in 1995, Adrienne Salinger's book In My Room was an immediate success, selling nearly 24,000 copies in its first few years. The continued popularity of this work made in the '80s and '90s is curious. However, over the nearly 30 years since, and especially in the most recent decade of social media, the work's appeal has grown tremendously. In some cases, the work evokes nostalgia, but not primarily so. Adrienne Salinger hears from current teenagers often; many send her pictures of their bedrooms today. Social media encourages users to endlessly "rebrand" their identities, creating idealized fantasies, striving for perfection. These photographs are not about perfection. They give voice to the contradictions of our identities.
Hundreds of print and online articles, interviews and features on In My Room have been published and the work has been exhibited at museums all around the world. Long out of print and now considered a classic, with only a rare few available on the secondary market, the book returns in a new expanded edition as Teenagers in Their Bedrooms. With 26 additional photographs, this treasure is made available once more to new audiences.
Adrienne Salinger has published three photobooks: In My Room (1995), Living Solo (1999) and Middle Aged Men (2007). She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico.

Review Quotes

[The] series remains a timeless study on adolescent becoming.--Tiarna Meehan "Dazed"

Adrienne Salinger's '90s art book is one of my prized possessions, and its recent re-issue captures in even greater depth how young Americans cultivated and communicated selfhood pre-smartphone.--Greta Rainbow "Dwell"

Capturing the vibrancy of 80s and 90s teen America, 'Adrienne Salinger: Teenagers in their Bedrooms' is a reissue of the photographer's iconic 1995 collection that includes 26 unseen images.--Zoe Whitfield "A Rabbit's Foot"

The images capture an inflection point between childhood and adolescence.--Andrew Aoyama "The Atlantic"

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.--Rebecca Mead "The New Yorker"

The photographs capture private sanctuaries. Surrounded by posters, books, accessories and clutter, the teenagers are poised between adulthood and vulnerability, in a mish-mash of taste, personality and comfort.--Hannah Silver "Wallpaper*"

When it comes to photographing the secret lives of teenagers, all roads lead back to Adrienne Salinger.--Orla Brennan "AnOther Magazine"