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From 1959 to 1964, at a moment when youth culture was ascendant in American culture and politics, Joseph Sterling documented the lives of Chicago’s working-class teenagers. A student at the Institute of Design who was not far past adolescence himself, Sterling submitted a selection of these images for his graduate thesis, The Age of Adolescence, in 1962. After graduation he continued to roam the parks, streets, and beaches of Chicago, gaining an intimate access that resulted in images of teenagers that capture the tension between bravado and insecurity, while expressing the emphasis on pattern and design that he had learned at the school.