The Stones in ’78: Szabo’s portraits of the fans

In 1978 two of Joseph Szabo’s high school students invited him to join them at a Rolling Stones concert at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Sensing a promising photo opportunity, Szabo agreed, packing three 35mm cameras and plenty of black-and-white film. Some 90,000 Rolling Stones fans converged on the stadium for the concert, where Szabo captured them drinking, kissing, smoking, dancing and hanging out. Their young subjects transported by the music, the drugs, the alcohol and the community, Szabo’s Rolling Stones Fans photographs show unguarded moments of absorption and abandon in the sublimity of the rock and roll gig. Szabo recently returned to these contact sheets; an earlier edition of this work, published in 2007, is now highly collectible. Joseph Szabo: Rolling Stones Fans reprints photographs from this series, selected by Szabo, in a luxurious new edition.

Joseph Szabo (born 1944) has been called the ＂quintessential photographer of the teenager.＂ He is best known for his photographs of adolescents taken in and around the halls of Malverne High School in Long Island, where he taught photography from 1972 to 1999, which were published in the photobook classic Teenage (Greybull, 2003). Turning his camera on his students to get their attention, Szabo captured the anxiety and bravado of the American teenager in classic documentary style black-and-white photographs that quickly attained cult status in the fashion world. In Szabo’s own words, his images capture ＂the years of restless desire and blossoming sexuality. The world of high school, parking lots and street corners, and the uniquely American culture in which all of us have grown up.＂