In 2011 Betsy Schneider, then the mother of a thirteen-year-old daughter, began a project about what that age actually contains. Over 2012 she traveled the United States and made still portraits and video documentation of 250 thirteen-year-olds, a cohort whose lives began at the turn of the millennium. To Be Thirteen gathers all 250 portraits alongside excerpts from the subjects’ own words and an interview with Schneider conducted by Rebecca Senf, chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography. Radius Books published the volume in hardcover at 8 by 10 inches, 524 pages, co-published with the Phoenix Art Museum, where an exhibition of the project opened in spring 2018.
The scale is the argument. Where adolescence is usually pictured through a handful of representative faces, Schneider’s method is accumulative: many sittings, many dispositions, made under conditions that stay consistent enough for difference to register. Her stated interest is in the dichotomies to which adolescence is so often reduced, and in the intensity, complexity, and beauty of that point in life, as well as how adults retain the experience afterward. A book of this length lets a viewer move through the whole group rather than sample it, so that recurring gestures, postures, and expressions become the subject as much as any individual sitter.
The publication’s form reinforces that logic. The publisher describes the book as conveying the experience of meeting the artist and looking through a stack of prints with her, which situates the reader in the archive rather than at a conventional exhibition remove. The interview supplies process and reflection; the participants’ words keep interpretation from resting solely on adult framing. Together these elements make the volume both a portrait series and a document of its own making.
For a collector, the interest lies in the coherence of concept, method, and book. To Be Thirteen belongs to a tradition of American collective portraiture while remaining specific to a generation coming of age now, and its 250-image structure gives the work a durational quality that few single-sitter monographs attempt. The museum co-publication and Senf’s contribution anchor it within an institutional conversation about portraiture and adolescence, making it a considered addition for readers concerned with how photographic books organize large bodies of evidence into meaning.
