Young Americans

Photographs by Terry Richardson and Joseph Szabo

24 June to 28 August 2005

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Joseph Szabo

Terry Richardson

The opening exhibition showed the work of two very different photographers with very different sensibilities, but who both share a common theme in their portrayals of American teenagers.

Joseph Szabo was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1944. After receiving his MFA from the Pratt Institute, he taught photography at Malverne High School in Long Island, New York from 1972 to 1999. During his tenure at the school, his students became his subjects capturing the unique years of adolescence in all their bravado, awkwardness and excitement.

Predominately taken during the seventies and eighties, the photographs have a timeless quality which both provide a remarkable evocation of the period in which they were taken, and also a freshness and intimacy which makes them feel like they were only taken yesterday.

There is no pretence or artifice in these photographs, the subjects are captured as they really are, and as they want the world to perceive them. And it is this quality that the photographs share with the works of Terry Richardson.

Terry Richardson was born in New York in 1965. Brought up in an artistic family, he was raised in France and the US, and at an early age started to document the burgeoning punk scene developing around him in Hollywood, and the many of his friends caught up in its extreme lifestyle.

Returning to New York after his studies, Richardson continued exploring documentary photography capturing a generation lost to drugs, sex and alcohol in the early 90's on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It was during this period that he started working as a fashion photographer and his images started appearing in magazines such as The Face, iD, Dazed & Confused, Harper's Bazaar, British Vogue and Index.

Richardson's provocative images for campaigns for Sisley and, more recently, Gucci, have helped transform fashion photography, and although separate from each other, his personal and commercial work have influenced and infused the other.

But it is his personal work, even those that are 'out-takes' from his fashion campaigns, that really sets his work apart. His fascination with the human condition in all its guises. His images are at once erotic, eccentric, raw, spontaneous, poignant, quirky and intimate. They reveal their subject's relationship to their own sexuality and to being photographed with no boundaries, no secrets and no pretensions. They are both private and personal but also human and universal.

The exhibition demonstrates the contrasts and similarities between these two influential photographers and the intimate relationship between photographer and subject which is so unique to the art of photography.

Download press release [PDF, 48KB]

Exhibition Courtesy of the Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.