70s Youth Culture: Joseph Szabo's Intimate Portraits

Joseph Szabo began his career not in a gallery or a studio, but in a high school classroom. When he took a job teaching photography at Malverne High School on Long Island, New York, he arrived with a camera in hand. From his very first days there, he turned his lens on the students around him — catching them in unguarded, personal moments that most photographers never get close enough to see.

50+ Intimate Portraits That Capture 70s Youth Culture By Joseph Szabo

What made Szabo’s access so rare was his role. As a teacher, he moved through the school’s hallways, courtyards, and common spaces every day. Students grew used to him. They stopped posing. The result was a body of work that felt less like formal portraiture and more like a visual diary of adolescence.

The 1960s and 1970s were a turning point in American youth culture. A large part of a generation rejected the values of mainstream society. These young people — often called hippies — built their lives around ideas like communal living, harmony with nature, free artistic expression, and a rejection of traditional social rules. Music was central to their identity, and recreational drug use was widespread and open.

Many of the teenagers Szabo photographed at Malverne High School were products of this era. Their clothing, body language, and the way they carried themselves all reflected the counterculture that had been building since the mid-60s. These weren’t posed images meant to flatter — they were honest snapshots of young people figuring out who they were.

Szabo photographed students smoking, laughing, flirting, daydreaming, and sitting alone. He captured the small, quiet moments that define teenage life just as much as the loud ones. A girl leaning against a locker. Two boys sharing a cigarette. A couple pressed close together on a bench. These scenes were ordinary at the time, but Szabo recognized their value as a record of a very specific moment in American history.

His photographs are black and white, which strips away the distractions of color and forces the viewer to focus on faces, expressions, and body language. The grain of the film adds texture. Nothing looks polished or staged. That rawness is exactly the point.

Long Island in the 1970s wasn’t Greenwich Village or Haight-Ashbury. It was suburban America — strip malls, split-level homes, and school buses. But the counterculture had spread far beyond its big-city origins by then, and Szabo’s photographs prove it. The same attitudes, the same styles, and the same sense of defiance that defined youth in San Francisco also existed in the hallways of a Long Island public school.

Szabo wasn’t a distant observer shooting from across a room with a telephoto lens. He was close. His subjects fill the frame. You can see the texture of their denim jackets, the rings on their fingers, the expressions they didn’t bother to hide. That physical closeness is what separates his work from most documentary photography of the period.

The teenagers in these photographs were not famous. They were not the leaders of any movement. They were ordinary kids living through an extraordinary cultural moment, and Szabo was there to record it with honesty and without judgment.

His work at Malverne spanned years, not just weeks or months. That sustained presence allowed him to build real relationships with students. Some appear in multiple photographs across different years, visibly growing up between frames. The collection functions almost like a yearbook — but one that no school administration would have approved.

Szabo’s photographs show teenagers as they actually were — not as adults wished to see them. They smoke. They embrace. They look bored, restless, confident, and lost, sometimes all at once. There is no attempt to clean up the image of 1970s youth or make it more acceptable to a general audience.

The counterculture values of the era show up clearly in the photographs. Long hair on both boys and girls, relaxed postures, a general indifference to authority — these details appear again and again. Some students carry the look of someone who has fully committed to an alternative way of living. Others look like they’re still testing the edges of what’s allowed.

What Szabo built over his years at Malverne High School was an archive. Not of events or milestones, but of moods, attitudes, and the texture of daily teenage life in one corner of 1970s America. The photographs are specific to their time and place, and that specificity is exactly what makes them so compelling.