Soul Asylums

Snoopy lamps and Venus de Milo on night stands. Diet pills and candy wrappers on top of a dresser. Superman staring down at a shaved teen-ager’s head.

Step, if you dare, into their “subhuman” subculture.

Adrienne Salinger did.

And the photographer survived to create a collection of “Teen-agers in Their Bedrooms,” photos that explore the bedroom museums of post-pubescent pre-twentysomethings. (Salinger’s exhibit is on display through Wednesday at the California Center for the Arts Gallery, 247 S. Kalmia St., Escondido. Her photos, along with interviews she conducted, will be published next year by Chronicle Books.)

What did she find?

“Everybody turned out to be much more intelligent and complex than we would expect,” says the associate professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University.

She also learned that teen-agers don’t always fit the stereotypes. And neither did their ideas of interior decorating, which ranged from incorporating Las Vegas-inspired flocked wallpaper to Bohemian starkness to typical teen fare: girlie posters and calendar hunks plastered on walls.

“But mostly, their rooms refused the stereotypes because you can look at a teen-ager and say, ‘Oh, she’s a deadhead,’ and then there is this evidence in the bedroom of incredible industry,” says Salinger, 36.

Another teen-ager, one with a pierced nipple and room decor to match, “turned out to be the smartest one” of the 140 teen-agers Salinger photographed in 1990 and 1991 in New York state. She cruised the malls and hit the streets, record stores, movie theaters, fast-food joints and clubs for potential photo subjects.

“They are raw and open and clear-thinking,” she says about the teen-agers she captured on film. “Their masks are not yet formed. They are both child and adult, and that conflict is evident in their bedrooms.”