She stopped along the way to photograph and interview over 400 teens. In 2002, photographer Robin Bowman grabbed her camera, hopped in her car, and went on a road trip across the United States. Robert Coles is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of the Children of Crisis series and a Harvard emeritus professor of psychiatry. This book is a compilation of photographs and interviews with teens from all across America. Eugene Smith Memorial fellow, is a photojournalist based in Portland, Maine.ĭr. This book and the traveling exhibition it accompanies are about the inside lives of these kids and how they see their reality in their own voices. In searing and intimate photographs, presented alongside the young people’s voices of passion, pride, embarrassment, lust, pain, bewilderment, anxiety, joy, uncertainty, and rage, the book charts the coming of age of the largest generation in America-77 million strong-in every region of the country and every socioeconomic group: from a Texas debutante to teenage gang members in New York City, from a drag queen in Georgia to a coal miner in West Virginia.īowman’s intimate photographs ask us to reconcile preconceived ideas and stereotypes of teenagers with the diversity of individuals in the portraits.

The respect she pays her subjects and their journey is so plain to see, it's hard to avert your eyes from the potraits. Robin Bowman’s five-year journey into the heart of teenage America created a series of 414 “collaborative portraits,” wherein she shares her discoveries of a generation now coming of age. Robin Bowman's photography is as authentic as it gets.Captivating black and white potraits of teenagers telling their own story through Robin's lens.

It's Complicated by Robin Bowman