Photos: These teenage smokers are the faces of 1990s rebellion
Ed Templeton chronicles the Kool kids
Is there anything cooler than being a teenager?
Sure, you gotta answer to your parents and sit through math class, but you have your health and youth and the world’s an oyster. Plenty of time to do stupid shit, like smoke.
Photographer Ed Templeton started making pictures in earnest while on tour as a professional skateboarder. His Teenage Smokers was published in 1999, a product of selective editing culled from the images he was continually snapping on the road. The collection offers a candid look back at a slowly disappearing teenage rite of passage.
Teens today are more likely addicted to their smartphones than cigarettes (or they’re vaping, which might even be less cool than playing on an iPad). But a few years ago kids were still lighting up in droves.
In the early 1990s, tobacco industry price wars resulted in a ten-percent drop in the cost of cigarettes. Teen smoking rates — which had previously been in decline — shifted accordingly, rising one-third between 1992 and 1997. But this trend was anomalous: the blip in teen smoking fizzled quickly at decade’s end, a product of determined anti-smoking campaigns and taxation. Since 1998 cigarette use among high school-age teens in the U.S. has dropped dramatically.
Seen in this context, Templeton’s work takes on added significance as documentation of a fleeting phenomenon specific to the time. Teen smoking is far from extinguished, but these pictures reiterate how large a part of the culture it was nearly two decades ago. Insecurity on full display, the timeless mid-drag posturing of adolescence remains palpable.
Photographs © Ed Templeton from Teenage Smokers and Teenage Smokers 2.
