High School Yearbook

The high school yearbook is ubiquitous in American youth culture, serving to document the school community and exist in the material world as a visual, historical record.

Mimicking the format and general photographic process utilized high school yearbooks, Jacob Karlin and Dylan Beckman recreate and allude to the pageantry of youth that exists among the pages of the yearbook. In a hyperbolic fashion, the images play with the personal as well as the universal: developmental time stamps, nostalgia, archive, zeitgeist, and stereotypes within American youth culture.

By utilizing only two bodies, and featuring each character separately, the work highlights the simulacra of various identities we perform and display in our mid to late adolescence as we discover our identities and experiment with how we wish to portray ourselves to the world.