These Cult-Favorite Photos Explore the Teen Bedroom Before Social Media

When I moved away for college, I sold my bedroom to my little sister for $300. While objectively the better room—further from our parents, with an attached sunroom overlooking the garden I was always sure fairies lived in, and papered with cutouts from almost every Teen Vogue issue from the early 2010s—its material facts didn’t matter. What I was selling to her was the carefully constructed image of my former self.

Teenage bedrooms are temporary havens for temporary people, places where adolescents can try on identities before fully emerging from childhood to enter the world of adults. These spaces were the focus of photographer Adrienne Salinger’s 1995 book In My Room: Teenagers in their Bedrooms, which compiled 40 portraits of young Americans in their rooms with text snippets from hours-long conversations Salinger had with her subjects as they faced her large-format film camera.

Salinger also documented people who live alone and middle-aged men for other projects, but no collection was as popular as her teen portraits from the 1980s and ’90s, which quickly gained a cult following. Though her original wish was to price the book no more than the cost of a CD, 30 years later, copies can resell for hundreds. (I’m the lucky owner of a first-edition, courtesy of San Francisco-based sourcer PRESS.) This August, D.A.P. reissued the enduring art book with 26 new prints from Salinger’s vault; she estimates she photographed about 200 teens she scouted in gyms, parks, restaurants, and mall restrooms in New York, Washington, and California. She had to hunt down rights agreements from the added subjects, many of whom now have kids of their own.

As much as the photos archive the aesthetics of their era, my favorite shots are evidence of the perennial adolescent impulse to belong to a certain scene, to signal a certain personality. While for teens today that pursuit largely plays out on social media, where personal curation is subject to the gaze of others, Salinger’s photos document a time when young people relied on physical possessions—band posters, magazine clippings, street signs, school trophies—to cultivate their self-image.

There’s 17-year-old Fred H.’s wall-to-ceiling patchwork of model photoshoots from Ebony and Michael Jordan newsclips. Amie D., also 17, has plenty of wall art too: a collage of fashion and beauty items from brands like Esprit sits near a No Parking sign. (Several of the teens have street signs on their walls.) Some tropes are still relevant: A DIY "Save the Earth" poster in Amie D.’s room, or the Earth Day 1990 flyer taped to the wood-paneled wall of 17-year-old Danielle D., wouldn’t be out of place in the room of a Gen Z Sunrise Movement organizer pushing for environmental policies like the Green New Deal. The figurines lining 17-year-old Rick V.’s shelves, or 19-year-old Karl B.’s stuffed animal collection, would align with the recent trinket craze. TikTok would call 16-year-old Carlos C.’s setup—a clothing-covered mattress on the floor—a BoyRoom.