The Adolescent Comedy

The Adolescent Comedy collects Joseph Sterling's photographs of American teenagers, made between 1959 and 1964. It was his master's thesis project at Chicago's Institute of Design, and it established him as one of the sharpest observers to come out of that program.

Sterling photographed adolescents in drive-ins, cars, and after-school hangouts around Chicago. He applied the pattern-and-design discipline taught by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind to loose, observational street scenes of teenagers caught between childhood and adulthood. Only Photography published this edition in Berlin in 2015, a limited run of 500 numbered copies. It reproduces the work as 136 tritone plates on coated stock, a production distinct from Sterling's earlier monograph The Age of Adolescence (Greybull Press, 2005).

Sterling (1936-2010) studied under Callahan, Siskind, and Frederick Sommer at the Institute of Design and earned his M.S. in 1962. He later helped establish the photography department at Columbia College Chicago. He belonged to a circle of students known as the "ID 5," alongside Kenneth Josephson, Ray Metzker, Joseph Jachna, and Charles Swedlund. His photographs are held by the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, and the Art Institute of Chicago.