Who, having once survived adolescence, would wish again to be a teenager? Teenagers have attained their adult height and sexual characteristics, but are emotionally and intellectually immature; nowadays their development is further delayed because they are immersed in a popular culture more likely to infantilize them than to help them grow up, and educated in schools where the curriculum is liable to be mush. Into those schools came portrait photographer Dawoud Bey; 40 of his “Class Pictures” are currently on display at the Aperture Gallery.

Taking class photos for high school yearbooks is the scut work of the professional photography pecking order, something done by hacks, not by a professor of photography at Columbia College, the distinguished art school in Chicago, nor by a holder of a master of fine arts degree from the Yale University School of Art. But since his first exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979, Mr. Bey (b. 1953) has made a career of reviving spent genres. His first major projects, black-and-white street photographs, presented his African-American subjects in ways at odds with the prevailing conventions.

In the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights upheavals, blacks were either valorized in photographs — that is, presented as heroic Freedom Fighters — or shown as victims; one Newsweek cover featured the face of a black man delicately lit so as to highlight the glycerin tear on his cheek. But Mr. Bey’s early work was influenced by that of the great Roy DeCarava, who showed his love and respect for black people by photographing them as persons, not as stereotypes. By restoring them to the human race, Mr. DeCarava made them accessible to non-blacks. This is an enormous accomplishment.

Mr. Bey has been photographing in color for the last several decades, first with a special large-format Polaroid camera, and more recently with a 4-by-5-inch field camera. The works in the “Class Pictures” exhibition are all 40-by-30-inch Chromogenic prints made digitally by scanning the color negatives. This preserves the rich detail captured on film so the texture of the subjects’ skin and hair can be an important element in their portraits. Given the attention teenagers, both male and female, pay to their complexions and grooming, this seems appropriate.

The high schools in which Mr. Bey photographed were located in Chicago, Detroit, New York, San Francisco, and other cities. Because he wanted as broad a selection as possible, the schools are both public and private, and the students of many ethnic and social backgrounds. Wherever he is, and with whomever, he seems to have in abundance that most essential talent for a portrait photographer, the ability to put his subjects at ease. Given how self-conscious most teenagers are, this is a testament to his character, charm, and perseverance. As with his early work in Harlem, there are no stereotypes. The students present themselves without coyness or bravado, willingly conceding to the camera that they are merely who they are. This makes them terribly engaging.

One feature that all the portraits have in common is that the subjects gaze out directly at the viewer. Beyond that, each pose is unique. Charles, for instance, has his crossed arms resting on the back of the chair he straddles. Lauren has her elbows resting on a wooden table and her cheeks resting on the back of her hands. Danny has his hands in his lap. David, also straddling a chair, has his arms crossed with his hands on his shoulders. Odalys has her left arm resting on the backpack on her lap, and her right elbow planted on the backpack with her jaw resting on the clenched hand. Michelle has her chin resting on her arms crossed on a table. In Mr. Bey’s pictures, the position of the hands is almost as significant as the expression on the faces; these are studies of body language that reflect their teenage subjects’ physical restlessness.

The color and lighting are also handled remarkably well, almost as in painted portraits. Lauren’s round Asian face, with its tan freckles and dark eyes, is set off naturally by her black hair, but her skin tone is also enhanced by showing above the neutral gray of her sweatshirt. The sweatshirt, in turn, is set off against the reddish wood of the table where she sits. Since Mr. Bey’s pictures are always focused on the plane of the face, most of his backgrounds are blurred although still distinguishable. The background behind Lauren is a wall of off-white window frames through which we see indistinct areas of bright green and dark green, presumably trees. The apparently casual arrangement of shapes and colors nonetheless has the effect of inevitability.

Shaheeda is a black girl whose skin is mottled on her forehead, cheeks, and chin. Her hair is tinted red, and big silver hoops hang from her ears. She wears a plain, bright white T-shirt, and clean blue jeans, and sits on the floor with her arms crossed on her knees. Her back rests against a wooden cabinet whose door has the names of former students carved into it. The brown of her face and arms is picked up by the cabinet door and some school chairs blurred in the background. That color is complemented by the masses of the white shirt and blue jeans, with the red hair adding a sharp note. As with Lauren and nearly all the others, the meticulous arrangement does not seem strained, and invites us to contemplate the character of its subject.

Mr. Bey does not treat his teenagers as a separate species; they’re people, like us.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until February 28 (547 W. 27th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-505-5555).