We Are Experienced

Book excerpt: Danielle Levittarrived at her distinctive photographic style capturing street fashion, pop culture, and celebrity for countless publications. While producing this commercial work, Levitt also pursued her passion for documenting American youth. The result is We Are Experienced, Levitt's first monograph, a series of portraits depicting adolescents in a variety of urban, suburban, and rural settings, as individuals and in groups, loaded with signifiers both mainstream and marginal. We Are Experiencedincludes football stars, tanorexics, wiccans, punks, prom dates, snowboarders, and baton twirlers. Levitt revels in the beauty of the age and its incomparable potential. She also exposes an advanced awareness particular to a generation. The notion of strident youthfulness was invented in the last century; today it is an understood quantity, a streamlined experience. Levitt's subjects are well-schooled in the expectations, limitations, and developmental strategies of growing up American, and have unparalleled resources to identify in a multitude of ways. We Are Experienced is a lushly stylized archive of the choices they make.