Nico Young, 18, has an issue with pictures of teenagers by “old photographers.”

“A lot of the stuff I see adults trying to capture is simply impossible to capture by virtue of them being of a different age and a disconnected viewer,” he said.

Young, an art student at U.C.L.A., graduated last year from Santa Monica High School, where he took hundreds of pictures of his classmates. His work has been published in numerous publications.

Young described himself as more of a participant than a reporter. The subjects in the images are his friends, captured as they moved together through the rituals of teenage life. Young said he would only bring along his camera every so often, and he would only snap a handful of photos within a day.

“I didn’t want it to be like, ‘Oh, we’re hanging with Nico. We’re going to be photographed,’” he said. “I was kind of preserving my social life.”

A couple years ago, Young drew national attention after a teacher recommended his photography to the New York Times Magazine, which gave him an assignment to depict what high school life was like.

“His photos were brimming with an uncommon authenticity and emotional depth,” Kathy Ryan, the magazine’s director of photography, wrote in an introduction to his photos.

Young shared a selection of images from a new project that he shot at Santa Monica High during the 2017 spring semester titled “Days Until Graduation.”

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