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-wall 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. 

For the last decade at least, teens have turned the camera on themselves daily, making media and sharing it widely—maybe to a few dozen friends, often to some thousand strangers. Since the pandemic, young people have also gotten used to beaming virtually into school, presenting book reports from their bedrooms with dirty laundry hampers or family photos in the frame. But it was a big deal for Salinger to enter the teenagers’ rooms and photograph them. In the book’s introduction, American author Tobias Wolff credits Salinger with fostering a unique trust. "Any grown-up who has recklessly entered the bedroom of a teenager without knocking knows what it means to receive a cool welcome," Wolff writes. "But there’s no atmosphere of invasion here…If Adrienne Salinger had wanted to present her subjects as satirical cliché, she could have. But ‘subjects’ is too cold a word for the way she views them, with such evident affection for their singularity, the difference each of them brings to the world."

"People don’t listen to teenagers because they think they’re stupid," Salinger tells me over Zoom from her Albuquerque, New Mexico, home. "Like, ‘How could they know anything?’ But I don’t agree with that. I think that teenagers, because they’re teenagers, have a really clear line to what they think about things. They don’t have to compromise yet." 

The very concept of the teenager is relatively young, solidifying in popular culture as a mid-20th-century marketing term. "We’re in a consumer culture, so we tend to define ourselves by our stuff. In a teenager’s case, everything has to fit in that room," Salinger says. "The way they layer past and present is very interesting to me. You change so quickly in those years." 

The internet has had a streamlining effect on the goods teens desire and fill their rooms with. Young people have always looked to idols for inspiration, but these celebrities weren’t so directly invested in the sale of products as social media influencers, or so around-the-clock accessible. And when these teens are influencers themselves? Their rooms are often immaculate replicas of Pinterest boards, absent of the mess Salinger delighted in.

Salinger’s shots resist reading as nostalgia-bait because they center the human marks on the interiors rather than the time-stamped technologies and fashions. But there is the sense that she couldn’t make the images today. On a literal level, we’ve increasingly become a culture of parental tracking apps, supervised playdates, and stranger danger. "Our overall sense of safety has changed," she says. "Would anyone let me in their spaces now? Would they allow anybody else to determine their identity when they’re reinventing themselves throughout every day with filters?" The communication of selfhood changed with the smartphone; not only is physical media less essential to individuation and expression, but teens are increasingly fluent in the politics of perception. 

In recent years a panic has emerged around the modern teenager. Many have called it a national emergency as self-harm, suicide, and anxiety and depression diagnoses sharply rise. Meanwhile the typical indicators of rebellion are all in decline: fewer teens are trying cigarettes (though e-cigarettes are a different story), drinking alcohol, and having sex. American kids and teens are even watching less broadcast TV, turning instead, however, to videos on Youtube and TikTok. The main "vice" that’s on the up is smartphone use. Maybe I am a little nostalgic when I read Salinger’s interview excerpts and remember the relief of returning to my room to process the business of growing up.

If a pre-internet teenage bedroom was a container for the interior world of its occupier, then a post-internet teenage bedroom is a vortex where external stimuli and information—infinite, swirling, and often from social media—regularly seeps in. The natural teenage feeling of isolation pairs dangerously with the contemporary ability to instantly tap in. An eerie foil to Teenagers in their Bedrooms is a CBS photo essay from 2024 documenting the bedrooms of eight children killed in school shootings. So are the bedrooms of high school-aged content creators with their crisply tucked sheet corners and professional-grade makeup stations (future "dorm influencers" in the making?). Too many teenagers never get to grow up, and many more don’t spend nearly long enough as kids. Salinger’s photos remind us of the beauty that is the in-between.

For all the cultural weight of Teenagers in their Bedrooms, there’s a bittersweet futility to trying to describe the meaning of one’s own teenage bedroom in retrospect. When my parents eventually found out about my under-the-table bedroom sale, they were livid, and immediately returned my sister’s hard-earned babysitting cash. But the symbolic deed was done. I no longer needed a territory marked clearly as my own. I was ready to be in the wider world, because after so many hours behind my bedroom door, cutting and pasting the shapes of my desires, I’d drafted a version of myself I was excited to become.

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Related Reading:

A Love Letter to "Material World," a ’90s Photo Book of Families With All of Their Possessions

Young Adults Who Moved Home During COVID-19 Are Making Over Their Childhood Rooms—and Their Mindsets