Teenage Wasteland: Portraits of Japanese Youth in...

Teenage Wasteland: Portraits of Japanese Youth in Revolt

Featured Curator: Liam Graham [cannery-row]

In 1964, English LIFE photographer Michael Rougier travelled to Japan to document a generation in revolt - the Japanese youth rebelling against their country’s culture of conformity. He came away with “an astonishingly intimate, frequently unsettling portrait of teenagers hurtling wilfully toward oblivion,”  

In Rougier’s photos — pictures that seem to breathe both reckless energy and acute despair — we don’t merely glimpse kids pushing the boundaries of rebellion. Instead, we’re offered the rare and disquieting gift of complicity: this generation of lost boys and girls, Rougier’s pictures suggest, is trying to tell us something — something reproachful and perplexing — about the world we’ve made.

Or rather, the world we’ve broken.