Teens in America, pose by pose

ANDOVER - Fifteen years ago, photographer Dawoud Bey, as artist-in-residence at Phillips Academy, shot a series of large-scale Polaroid portraits of students there and at Lawrence High School. When he exhibited them at the Addison Gallery of American Art at the academy, he titled each photo with the subject's first name, and made no reference to school affiliation. Depriving us of that indicator of public school or private, and of social class, he compelled his viewers to look more closely at the young people in his photographs, to see what they had to tell us about themselves.

Bey is back at the Addison with "Class Pictures," a project that is, like many teenagers, by turns compelling and frustrating. It includes portraits taken of students at Lawrence High School and Phillips Academy between 2003 and 2006, as well as classroom-based photographs of teenagers in New York, Chicago, and Detroit.

Since that 1992 residency, shooting young people has become Bey's life's work. He's done it with different types of cameras (the 20x24 Polaroid, and for "Class Pictures," a 4x5 camera on a tripod), and he's dallied in diptychs and triptychs that suggest time passing. Always, he has focused on gently uncovering the truth of his subjects.

Teenagers are tricky; images in the media tend to focus on them as troublemakers or, as Bey puts it in an interview with Carrie Mae Weems in the show's catalog, as "engines for a certain consumerism." More than anyone else, they invent and reinvent themselves, trying on styles, ideologies, and modes of expression to signify what's important to them - even if they don't know what that is.

That's why this show frustrates: Trying to capture that wild mutability is like attempting to hold water in your fist. Unveiling the elusive self of the sitter is a classic conundrum of portraiture. Photographing adolescents, who often hide and strut in the same gesture, is a portraitist's ultimate challenge. The artist doesn't want his subjects to pose, exactly; he wants to engage them, to put them at ease, to find what's beneath the posing.

Bey's remarkably good at it, even though some of these kids resist him. For "Class Pictures," he invited each student to write a personal statement to accompany his or her portrait.

In addition to photos, he has made "Four Stories," a series of video portraits, which run on a loop in a darkened gallery. As the teens speak about themselves, the camera wanders intimately over their faces, lighting on mouth or eye, or some texture of the skin. It's visually absorbing but not successful as portraiture. I found it impossible to listen and watch at the same time. The camera was too close; the face became a landscape to explore. The words seemed irrelevant.

In the photographs, the text elucidates the pictures, sometimes sweetly, sometimes disturbingly.

Take Jordan. His sad, bleary blue eyes belie his words: "I am very content with myself and what I have accomplished thus far in my life, and I treat each day with hope that it can be better than the previous." The subtext: The previous day was a struggle.

Jordan likely wrote what he was supposed to write, what his parents and teachers would hope to hear from him. Bey found something else in his eyes.

With others there is no getting beyond the outer shell. Ultimately, the pageant of humanity is no different whatever your age - some people connect, and some don't.

Look at Gerard. He sits upright, arms crossed on the desk in front of him, implacable. Unlike Jordan, his eyes don't let us in; he's too busy looking out. "I am a hardworking man and I am black," he writes. "I have a nice smile and nice long hair." We see neither (his hair is perhaps tied back).

The young men often reveal themselves bluntly, and sometimes unwittingly. Robert, big and baby-faced with a goatee, wears a football jersey; he looks at once seething and innocent. About his girlfriend, he writes, "My life is perfect with her. I mean, ever since I got with her I stopped fighting. I quit all the stuff I used to do and just put all my time with her. I mean, if she wants me to I mean." God help them, the couple planned to marry.

Then there's Kevin, who leans toward the viewer boldly, wearing a baseball cap with his name emblazoned on it. He's someone whose hand you want to grab and shake. His text is equally disarming, reflecting on his father's death and how it has blessed him and cursed him.

Perhaps the women have more experience in self-composition. Leery and remote Isabel won't smile for the camera (not many do, but she makes a point of talking about it). Sarah, in leather and eye makeup that makes her look gothic and sickly, writes, "I may be different, but I take silent comfort in my difference."

We are all different, which is something teens, so attuned to whether they fit in and how they don't, often don't quite accept. But it's something Bey knows, and seeks out in his subjects, breaking through our stereotypes (and their pack mentality) to find the real people.