Photographs and Interviews by Robin Bowman Afterword by Dr. Robert Coles Robin Bowman`s five-year journey into the heart of teenage America created a series of 414 collaborative portraits, wherein she shares her discoveries of a generation now coming of age in America. In searing and intimate contemporary photographs, presented alongside with the young people`s own voices of passion, pride, embarrassment, lust, dread, pain, anxiety, instability and rage, the book charts the coming of age of the largest generation ever in America, almost double the 1960s baby boomers. In her exploration, she has photographed teens in every region of the country and every socioeconomic group: from a Texas debutante to teenage gang members in New York City; from a drag queen in Georgia to a coal miner in West Virginia. Her intimate photographs invite individuals to look more closely at how complex challenges facing a rising generation of Americans have informed individual identities. The photographs also ask us to reconcile preconceived ideas and stereotypes of teenagers with the diversity of individuals in the portraits. The 77 million teenagers now or soon to enter high school are the Gen Y, following on another 50 million they called Gen X. This book and the traveling exhibition it accompanies are about the inside lives of these kids and how they see their reality. About the Author: Robin Bowman is a 2005 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fellow, based in Portland, Maine, devoted to documenting the poignant social and political issues of our age. In a five-year odyssey to virtually every state across America. Bowman began interviewing and making portraits of kids. A traveling exhibition of the portraits will open at the museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and is traveling to Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Robin Bowman`s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Bibliotheque Nationale, International Center of Photography, New York, and more. She lives in Portland, Maine.