The adolescent condition, of striped tee-shirts, oily hair and Led Zeppelin album covers, is, despite appearances, a serious age. A mixture of awakenings and fallen dreams. 67-year-old Joseph Szabo is a photographer and teacher at Malverne High School, NY. Over 20 years of teaching has served as raw material for his work. Through his photographs, he speaks the language of a youth, the universal parley/discourse of crystallized desires and youthful passions that melt like snow in the sun. Poses are freely struck by the models and an eery similarity emerges - an idealized image of youth culture and a common soft dreamy quality. Beyond that, the bodies on these photographs are expectant, searching for their place, pursuing an attitude. A game of exchanged looks with the camera, modest, eluding, confident… The 60’s are fading and love has not yet been marketed.
His pictures also reflect a dialectic of youth. An infinite past coexisting with a real and absolute present. An unfixed, ever-moving time close to our hearts. A spark we recognize, something unlocked… And then there’s Priscilla, the little girl with the cigarette strolling on the beach, the one who said “no”. The one who always says “no”, yesterday and today. She refuses. Is it the picture or the girl refusing? Probably all of us. We refuse alongside her. Her glance shoots through the horizon, and her photograph burns like her cigarette, she lights the fuse and it blows. One thing’s for sure, these snapshots expose the essence of the everyman, and at the center, the truth comes out - Szabo’s truth.
- Romain Duriac
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