Mulno Exhibits: Teenagers Over the Ages

Mike Mulno is curating a photo exhibition in San Diego, California at the Joseph Bellows Gallery, featuring photographs of teenagers across decades – from the 1960s to present day. The exhibition captures those formative years where identity is formed and hormones and emotions run high, compared to the unending boredom on a backdrop of endless summers.

While the fashion changes, the experience of puberty remains the same. We see bell bottoms and high waisted trousers, and bedrooms with Farrah Fawcett as pin up girl.

Mike Mulno, the curator says the photographs explore the “physical, social, and emotional aspects of adolescence, and the formation of identity.  The photographs included in the exhibition present a collective portrait of youth: its awkwardness, innocence, fury, elation, beauty, and trepidation.”

Mulno chose photographers that had images of adolescence and photographers who could complement this theme. The Photographs are by Joseph Sterling, Edward Sturr, Enrico Natali, Elaine Mayes, Bevan Davies, Nacio Jan Brown, Melissa Shook, Harry Ibach, Duncan McCosker, Christine Osinski, Joan Albert, Sage Sohier, Mark Steinmetz, Andrea Modica, Bill Yates, John Myers and others will be included.

“Many of the photographers represented by the gallery have bodies of work that address the subject of adolescence in strong ways. I felt other photographers’ work that I admire would enhance the exhibition, so the gallery reached out to several other photographers or their agents to complement the exhibitions themes” said Mike Mulno.

The images are in black and white and take the viewer back to another time. We see those mini-console, black and white TVs, a vintage car and not to mention the ‘then to-die-for’ fashion. But the expression in the teenagers’ eyes speak to the universal themes of transformation, becoming and belonging.

“Adolescence is nothing if not an endless series of paradoxes. As a teenager you spend your days with packs of people, and yet often feel utterly isolated; you’re carving your own identity, and yet are indelibly shaped by the influences around you. It’s excruciating, and magical, and formative, with highs and lows that are as devastating as they are delirious,” said Mike Mulno.

This is an amazing idea for an exhibition and viewing these images is both touching and enlightening. By crossing over decades to reflect on what will never change, adolescence, we are reminded as the viewer of the very nature of our human condition.