Joseph Szabo - Lifeguard photo from Jones Beach

Lifeguard

Camaraderie and community on Jones Beach

Joe Szabo Photography

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.

 

“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.”

– Cornell Capa

Books from Joe Szabo

Almost Grown book cover

Almost Grown

A time of innocence and bursting sexuality, of tenderness and raucousness. Almost Grown celebrates in photographs and poetry the joys and uncertainties of that paradoxical time when we are no longer children and yet are not quite adults.

Joseph Szabo Teenage book cover

Teenage

A collection of photographs that begins with Almost Grown and adds new work never before seen from the 70s and 80s.

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Rolling Stones Fans

In the mid 1970’s two of my high school students approached me and asked if I would like to see a Rolling Stones Concert. They had the tickets and needed a friend with a car who would drive from Long Island to Pennsylvania.

Jones Beach

Beginning in the early 1970’s, Joseph Szabo started capturing the melting pot of humanity on Jones Beach, one of the busiest beaches in the world with more than six million visitors a year.

Lifeguard

LIFEGUARD documents the photographer’s encounters and friendships with the Jones Beach lifeguards in the photographs taken between 1990 and 2015.