The photos in this book are a prequel to Szabo's 2003 title Teenage which featured the growing youth of Malverne High School, Long Island, New York (where he taught photography). Hometown reveals the typical suburbs that teenagers lived in though there are only three taken in Malverne, the others are all in the eastern US, especially New York.
The thirty-eight photos were taken between 1973 and 1980 and all exterior shots of tidy timber frame houses mostly photographed from the sidewalk with the usual neat lawns, parked cars and the occasional person working in the garden or children playing. An interesting collection of suburban architecture but not really comparable to Bill Owens's now classic Suburbia photobook taken in the seventies of Livermore, California with some exteriors but mostly concentrating on interior shots and the people who lived in this suburban sprawl of San Francisco.
The landscape shape of Hometown works well with most of the photos on a right-hand page facing a blank left, unfortunately the very brief captions are all on one of the back pages. Excellent printing by Damiani with a 200 screen on a matt art paper.
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