High School Yearbooks are an important aspect of American adolescence and are deeply synonymous with the idea of graduation and evolving into adulthood.

They provide a snapshot of a certain time and each image can be distilled into it’s most striking elements, a hair style or fashion choice which gleefully advertises the aesthetic of that time period.

For the past while I’ve been researching old high school yearbooks from the 1970’s and creating illustrations inspired by the photos of these foreign strangers. A huge departure from my previous interests. With these illustrations I like to exaggerate certain aspects while striving to retain what makes them the unique time capsules they are.

This excercise was born out of a love for retro photographs that capture the unmistakable nostalgia of the past.

Never has it been more prevalent to look back to the past. With phone apps providing retro filters and VHS-style distortion being added to videos there seems to be a particular fascination with replicating our recent past, a time when an analogue generation was on the cusp of the digital interconnected social entanglement that was to follow.

For me personally the all- American highschool of the 1970’s holds an abstract appeal, foreign yet familiar, old fashioned yet strangely relatable. Innocent yet still oozing the darkness and insecurities that breeds from youth.

These illustrations depict children existing on the edge of adulthood, in a world on the edge of a digital revolution.

With todays open-plan living spaces, live streaming and on-demand entertainment, these bizzare portraits represent a time of tactility, of treasured physicality and incredible style.

I thought my Class of 1974 series would be well suited to t-shirts, and wanted to avoid printing them because I wanted each t-shirt to be its own unique item. The designs were created using fabric markers.

These one of a kind t-shirts can be purchased here