The Awkward Formalities of High-School Prom

In the course of their decades-long collaboration, the photographers Ken Graves and Eva Lipman, a husband-and-wife team, documented a range of subcultures and spectacles—from ballroom-dancing competitions and boxing matches to mud baths and military training. (Graves, whose photos from the Bay Area in the sixties and seventies we published last year on Photo Booth, died earlier this month, at the age of seventy-four.) In the early nineties, the pair travelled to thirty high schools—rural and urban, public and private—to photograph an essential landmark in the educations of American teen-agers: prom. In an artist’s statement about the project, they wrote that they were drawn to prom’s contrasting spirits of formality and “uninhibited celebration,” to its adolescent energy and creativity, and to the ways in which it puts “human character and social ritual” on visible display.