62 Yearbook Photos That Are The Perfect Example Of One’s Awkward Teenage Years

One’s teen years are always awkward, which is ironic given that it’s probably the time one is most self conscious about how they are perceived. It’s also a time where people try new looks and really experiment with their identity.

So we’ve gathered some of the most hilariously awkward and random yearbook pics from across the internet. Get comfortable as you scroll through, brace yourself for some second hand embarrassment, upvote your favorites and if you’ve ever had some questionable photo choices in high school, share your story in the comments below.

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Photography changed everything, and it took a businessman to notice. In the middle of the 1800s a photographer named George Warren worked out how to print many copies from one negative, then nudged students into buying several portraits to trade with classmates. The result was the so called Warren yearbook, and NPR notes that an 1860 example from Rutgers has been displayed at the National Museum of American History.

The oldest surviving yearbook of any kind comes from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in the 1820s, and the first high school edition, a book called The Evergreen, followed in 1845, according to a public library’s history lesson. Teenagers have been posing for yearbook cameras for roughly 180 years. We have not gotten better at it.

So where does the awkwardness come from? Partly from the grim old days of portraiture. The popular theory says early subjects looked stern because exposures took forever, but Imaging Resource points out that split second exposures were possible by the 1870s and people still looked serious.

The better explanation is that portraits were supposed to resemble paintings, and a big grin did not suggest dignity. A newspaper feature from The Citizen adds that Victorian and Edwardian culture frowned on smiling, and that studios once asked people to say prunes instead of cheese. Prunes! No wonder everyone looked like they had just been handed a bill. Yearbook photography inherited that stiff, hold still tradition, and plenty of us are still carrying it around.

Then came the modern picture day, which is where the real trouble starts. A school photographer in Atlanta told Mental Floss that the job allows about thirty seconds per kid. Half a minute to sit on a stool, tilt your chin, and look delighted in a gym while a stranger gives orders and a long line of classmates watches.

Real smiles tend to reach the eyes only when people feel relaxed, so what the camera usually catches is a polite grimace. Add hair styled by a parent in the car, a shirt chosen under pressure, and the fact that many students are in the middle of an awkward growth spurt, and you have the recipe for a legend.

And then there is the pressure. A yearbook photo is not a snapshot that vanishes into a camera roll. It gets printed in a book, handed to hundreds of classmates, and stored in a closet for decades, which means every flyaway hair earns its own permanent record. Even the famous are not safe. Conan O’Brien has apparently ordered five extra copies of his Harvard yearbook over the years because his own copies kept getting destroyed, as reported by The Harvard Crimson.

Then there are the backdrops. In the 1980s plenty of school portraits featured glowing, criss crossed laser lines, a look that was considered fashionable at the time. Years later a Tumblr called We Have Lasers gathered the evidence, and Time treated the laser backdrop as the ultimate shorthand for an awkward childhood photo, right up there with braces and enormous bangs. A mottled blue backdrop, a stiff pose, and a tilted head joined the party.

The good news is that the evidence will last. Lifetouch, a major school photo company, says its portraits are printed on paper meant to resist fading for up to a hundred years. So the pictures in this list are not going anywhere. Be kind to the faces below, because every one of us has a laser backdrop somewhere in our past.

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