A playful look at Gen X teens coming of age in 1980s America

Back in 1972, Ser­gio Purtell embarked on an adven­ture of a life­time as a high school for­eign exchange stu­dent. He left his home­town of San­ti­a­go, Chile, board­ed an air­plane for the first time, and land­ed in Cincin­nati, Ohio, dur­ing a snowstorm. 

At the air­port Purtell’s host fam­i­ly, the Lees, turned out in full to wel­come him into their brood. Like a scene out of The Brady Bunch, he shared an attic bed­room with one of the boys, donned pur­ple cor­duroy bell­bot­toms paired with red, white, and blue sneak­ers, then hit the streets ready for base­ball, burg­ers, and roller skating.

Six months lat­er, Purtell returned home and grad­u­at­ed high school — only to have his dreams of col­lege life cut short by a mil­i­tary coup orga­nized by US Sec­re­tary of State Hen­ry Kissinger. In light­ning speed social­ist Pres­i­dent Sal­vador Allende was exe­cut­ed and in his place, the despot Gen­er­al Augus­to Pinochet began his reign of terror.

Unlike so many of his com­pa­tri­ots, Purtell could escape. His father was an Amer­i­can (who skipped out town while his moth­er was preg­nant). ​“My moth­er told me he had died. It was only lat­er I found out that what she real­ly meant was that he was dead to her,” he says.

Purtell returned to the only home he had ever known, spend­ing a year with the Lees and work­ing odd jobs. After dis­cov­er­ing he had a half broth­er liv­ing in New Eng­land, Purtell hopped a Grey­hound bus and began a new chap­ter of his life in America.

Now set­tled in, Purtell could final­ly pick up where he left off, only with his new­found pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy. He stud­ied at the Rhode Island School of Design and then Yale, where he began work­ing on a series that would become the new book, Moral Minor­i­ty (Stanley/​Barker), a por­trait of Gen X teens com­ing of age in 1980s America.

Con­ceived as a heart­felt love let­ter to the peo­ple of his adopt­ed home, Purtell looks back on his archive made some four decades ago with a know­ing eye of one who has seen their home­land fall to fascism.

While his pho­tographs are fun, bub­bly scenes of inno­cence, the book title is a call back to a dark chap­ter of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. With Ronald Rea­gan in the White House, Christo­fas­cism was on the rise, call­ing them­selves the ​“Moral Major­i­ty” to push reli­gious doc­trine through the Repub­li­can Party.

“I began to see the inequal­i­ties and the bal­ances of pow­er in this nation, how groups of peo­ple are pulled apart by race or reli­gion, the lev­els of dis­par­i­ty that kept peo­ple in their class­es under the guise of morals or reli­gion. Greed was good when dressed as an embod­i­ment of Amer­i­can free­dom and lib­er­ty,” Purtell says.

Purtell’s pho­tographs of every­day life stand as a poignant coun­ter­point to the rapa­cious appetite of fas­cism that runs ram­pant today. ​“Because of what I had gone through in Chile, I could smell fas­cism in the air: by the way Trump addressed and abused peo­ple and did as he pleased, his poise and agen­da,” he says. ​“All the things that I saw Pinochet do, and that are con­trary to democracy.”

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