My friends were pigeonholed into lives and careers that didn’t speak to me. So I left my Midwest college, packed my guitar and headed for New York. The folksinging dream quickly evaporated and I bought my first 35mm camera while working as a library file clerk at Life & Time Magazines. Inspired by their photo stories, I started to photograph life on the streets of Manhattan. It was the sixties, the decade that ushered in a new era in America, led by post-war baby-boomers who were the first generation to be shaped by the new medium of television. 

Like many Americans of my generation, I remember exactly where I was the day In 1963 that John F, Kennedy was assassinated. By 1968 the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy set cities on fire and the police brutality at the Democratic National Convention ignited protests across the country. Non-violent Civil Rights protests turned violent, playing out on nightly newscasts. In college, I had driven a Volkswagen bus to Greenville, Mississippi to register African American voters. It was a dangerous time.

Young men were dying in a place called Vietnam, fighting a war seemingly without end. A youthful counter-culture turned cynical, rebelling against the duplicity of social and political norms. Young people protested, dropped out, some took to drugs, or created communes on a search for a world where you could “make love not war.” I returned to the Midwest continuing my photography. It was a time when schools were open buildings, no security or shooter drills. Amid the backdrop of social upheaval and white flight to suburbia, life on the streets played out in the changing face of inner-city schools.

“High School” captures the turbulence of this time through the angst, honesty and grit of the young people I met, trying to navigate the uncertainty of adolescence amid the uncertainties of the times. Aging brick buildings with locker-lined hallways provided a backdrop to couple’s clinging to each other, using drugs, looking lost, bewildered or both. A student gives the corridor wall a high-five kick in a show of rebellion -  the rebellion of youth lost in a failing system with few options for a future . It was unlike any High School I remembered.

Click here to go to the larger sample of the High School Collection that Richard Olsenius made during his early years as a street photographer and newspaper intern at the Minneapolis StarTribune.