Adolescence

Images of the teenage years: the awkward, self-conscious and charged passage between childhood and adult life.

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About

Adolescence sits between childhood and adulthood, and art has often treated it as a state of suspense: guarded, self-aware, caught up in a body that is still changing. Earlier painters rarely singled it out, although Caravaggio's knowing young musicians and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's street boys hover at its edge.

The modern idea of the teenager took shape around 1900, and artists followed. Edgar Degas's wax Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–81) unsettled viewers with its unidealised body, and Edvard Munch's Puberty (1894–95) seats a girl on the edge of a bed beneath a looming shadow. Photography made the subject its own. Larry Clark's Tulsa (1971) recorded his young friends' drug use, Sally Mann's At Twelve (1988) portrays girls in rural Virginia, and Rineke Dijkstra's beach portraits of the 1990s catch young people halfway between posing and hiding. Look for borrowed clothes, crossed arms and wary eyes.