There were concert flyers from shows — at the Love Club, Filly's, Ripley's — that I was too young to go to and had carefully torn from telephone poles.

(A few years earlier the walls were caked with tattered pin-ups of Scott Baio, Leif Garrett, Parker Stevenson, The Fonz... Yeegads.)

There were other things in my room, too. A lot of other things. It was always a mess.

An old stereo with an eight-track tape player. A picture taken from a calendar depicting the parts of a sailboat. Behind that picture my best friend had scrawled in pencil a heart inscribed with "Teresa loves Louis." I'd completely forgotten it was there until the day I came home from college to clean up so my dad could wallpaper and re-design my room.

"It's a really difficult time in anyone's life. Probably the worst," says Adrienne Salinger, whose astounding photographic exploration In My Room: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms takes us to the private domains of 43 teenagers.

"I think that's why adults stereotype teenagers, because in the end we don't want to remember it. It's too hideous because it's too powerful."

Salinger photographed teenagers primarily in the upstate New York region, but her milieu could be Anywhere, U.S.A. She met her subjects in malls, restaurants, at the gym. She asked if she could photograph them in their bedrooms, devoid of parents and prep aration: don't clean up, she said (the prospect of an adult asking you not to clean up was probably thrilling in itself).

Each photo is accompanied by the teenager's own words, culled from a videotaped interview. The whole process, Salinger says, usually took four hours. The results are hardly ready-for-MTV, or even My So-Called Life.

We meet Karl B., a vegetarian "straightedge" (a punk-related philosophy that espouses no drugs of any kind) with his shock of pinkish hair and a room filled with punk show flyers, a Cramps sticker, books, stuffed animals and a Pluto figurine.

"Cats and dogs are dependent on us, and they've been domesticated and ruined. That's a serious thing," says Karl.

Alex V. sits on her moose-motif bedspread, in front of a tapestry-covered bookshelf, and speaks about her parents acting more like pals than authority figures.

Carlos C. is pictured sitting on his futon. He lives with a man he calls "Uncle Bill," a gay friend of his late father, a hemophiliac who died of AIDS. Carlos learned of the diagnosis only eight months before his death. " He thought it would be in my best interest to keep the wool over my eyes," says Carlos.

There's Lynne M., a teenager who shares her room with her baby daughter's bottles, toys and crib. Jono, whose room is a chaotic mess of car posters, sunglasses and baseball hats, begins his interview with, " Everyone else in my family is white. And I am not."

But inventories of their possessions can't begin to convey the cluttered individuality of these teenagers' rooms.

"Teenagers are on the edge of rapid change, " writes Salinger in the preface to her book. "Their rooms contain all of their possessions, and yet these are the last moments they will be living in their parents' homes. The past is cramped together on the same shelf as the future."

A bedroom is a projection of a teen's identity, though that identity is at best unstable.

"Everything tells the truth and lies simultaneously," Salinger says. "We're so complicated — teenagers in particular because they're reinventing themselves every moment. There's a rawness there... You change so rap idly during that period that the way you may choose to present yourself one minute sort of stays in your room, while you begin to speak a different line."

Those contradictions are revealed in the combination of Salinger's text and image.

David S. talks about his father dying of cancer when he was "six or seven" and that he still refuses to go to funerals. In his room he's surrounded by a slick car poster, a pastel drawing of peace symbols, a Little Caesar 's plastic mug and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.

The photos encourage questions. What are those thick black utility cords that snake out of view in Colleen B.'s photo?

Being of the "QT" generation, I giggled at the brown splotches on Leslie M.'s arms, assuming she' d had an accident with self-tanning lotion. But after reading about how she and her brother were home alone when their house caught on fire, I wondered if there were another reason.

Conversely, the text can work the same way. After reading Danielle D's description of her life as a bipolar manic-depressive, you look to the photo for some evidence — but she' s simply a sweet-looking girl sitting in a butterfly rattan chair.

" Some of the kids had these heartbreaking horrible things [happen to them] and you watch them make sense of it, with the kind of clarity that's available to you when you're an adolescent. They don't have the distraction of making a living and figuring out what you're going to do with your life. They can focus intensely on interpersonal things. So w hen I would ask questions of these people, they'd answer in very clear, sincere, deeply felt ways. There's no public and private. You ask a question, they answer it."

" When I decided to do the book, I had to re-contact everyone and ask if it was okay... Almost every time the part about drugs was fine, but they didn't want anything about sex. I find that fascinating. Acid trips are cool, but doing it with your boyfriend isn't?"

In most of the photos, the teenager looks straight ahead at the camera, and appears comfortable, assured. The viewer never feels superior to the photo, primarily because of Salinger's technique.

" I don't use flash because for work like this it would compromise the integrity. I would be able to capture people in the off moment so that the viewer could be one up on the people in it. I wanted [the teen] to have total dignity about it. So they' re long exposures, like a quarter of a second which is a real drag to sit still for, but it allows [the teen] to know when it' s going to happen. I used harsh shadows, double shadows. You don't register that as a viewer consciously. But subconsciously you do. It forces you to notice that somebody is making this picture."

Since the book is partially about design (of one's room), it makes sense that the design of the book would be self-conscious. David Carson, renowned designer of the ultra-hip, youth-oriented music and culture magazine Raygun , is known for his innovative if often illegible design. Here, however, his typography is clean, artistic and subtly specific to the style of the teenager's room.

"I felt like [Carson] really got the point. The work is so much about forcing people to abandon stereotypes and I think he was able to echo that through the design."

Salinger, an associate professor in the department of art media studies at Syracuse, said this kind of photography is unlike her other work, primarilyartistic studio compositions. She started taking photos of teenagers on the West Coast in the '80s., but it wasn't until this project that she added the videotaped interviews.

In the introduction to the book, Tobias Wolff (who wrote his pre-teen memoirs in This Boy's Life) compares Salinger's work to the James Agee/ Walker Evans essay/photo collaboration Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in its " rich collaboration of image and story, each compelling in its own right and often overwhelming in combination. "

Even more overwhelming, perhaps, is the exhibit of these photos, enlarged to 30 by 40 feet, now touring galleries in the U.S. Viewers are actually dwarfed by the images. "I like that," says Salinger.

In My Room is a book that's impossible to put down once you pick it up. I've watched several people approach the book with the same reaction — first thumbing through it with sporadic attention, then feeling compelled to look again and again, making connections between the photos and essays.

You see your past: Fred H.'s three walls covered in pinups (Kim Fields, Iman, Stephanie Mills).

You see the present: Betsy P. and her Mormon memorabilia, and junior anarchist Auto C. with his question mark tattoo.

And you wonder about the future, when these teenagers finally leave their rooms behind.