Joe Szabo is a teacher, photographer and author who began his photographic studies at Pratt Institute where he received an MFA degree in 1968. He taught photography at Malverne High School in Long Island from 1972-1999 and at the International Center of Photography in New York since 1978.
Joseph Szabo has been photographing his teen-age students for the past twenty-five years and has perfectly captured the ambivalence of that time of life. As a high school teacher of photography, he takes seriously their pretentions, passions, and confusions, and he knows intimately how students put on, act up, behave, and misbehave. As Cornell Capa says in his foreward, "Szabo's camera is sharp, incisive, and young, matching his subjects. One can use many adjectives: revealing, tender, raucous, sexy, showy... in Szabo's hands, the camera is magically there, the light is always available, the moment is perceived, seen, and caught."
In 1978, his book on adolescence Almost Grown was published by Harmony Books and acclaimed by the American Library Association and placed on its "Best Books of the Year" listing. In 1984, he received a Photography fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, Greybull Press published his second monograph entitled Teenage. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennial, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Brooklyn Museum among others. Szabo’s work is in the collection of many prestigious institutions including the Bibliotheque National in Paris, France, The George Eastman House Museum in Rochester, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Szabo’s photographs have also been published in numerous magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, Vogue Hommes International, New York Magazine, Newsday, New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Sunday Review (London) and The Times Magazine (London), Women’s Wear Daily, the French Arts Magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, Dazed and Confused Magazine and Rebel. Szabo’s work has been exhibited extensively at galleries in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Japan.
