Say cheese, but please don’t smile.

That’s what Debra Friedman told teens photographed for her exhibition, ‘Twelve to Twenty: Photographing Teenage Bermuda’.

The show opens tomorrow at the Masterworks Gallery in Paget.

“You’ll notice nobody is smiling in my portraits,” she said. “I ask my subjects not to smile, unless I see something that seems authentic.”

She said today’s teens are so used to posing and taking selfies that it is sometimes difficult to get a genuine expression out of them.

“A smile can be more of a barrier than an access point,” she said.

“There is something kind of false about it.

“If you are not smiling there is more expression that you can access through your eyes through subtle things. If you looked at maybe ten images of one person they look very similar, but there will be subtle nuance changes from one to the next. I am looking for that one little difference.”

Mrs Friedman is originally from Toronto, Canada, and was the Masterworks Artist in Residence earlier this year.

She likes photographing teens because they are at a pivotal point in their lives.

“At that age, you are trying to figure out who you are and where you belong,” she said.

“You are trying to find your tribe. There is that push between wanting to be unique and wanting to fit in.”

She has three teenage sons, with the youngest being 18.

“They are all away at college now,” she said.

“I do miss them, although their teen years were a real roller-coaster. Raising teens was challenging.”

The 59-year-old met Masterworks founder and director Tom Butterfield, through Ryerson University in Toronto, where her husband is a professor.

“Tom comes to Toronto a lot,” she said. “I did two other projects with adolescents, and he thought it might be good to do a project on Bermuda teens.”

At first, she had trouble just finding teens. Before she left Canada, she wrote to local schools and organisations asking for their help, but little came of it.

“I went to the beach expecting teens to be there, but it was January,” she said.

She had the most success finding teens to photograph in fast food restaurants on Queen Street and at the bus terminal in Hamilton.

“They seemed very relaxed and calm,” said Mrs Friedman. “A lot of the teens I met seemed to be on a shorter leash than teens back in Toronto.”

She visited the homes of a few local teens to delve deeper.

“Those young people were high achievers and really ambitious and programmed,” she said.

“They were often religious, which was really interesting to me. I made a point to go to a different church in Bermuda every Sunday or Saturday so I could learn more about this aspect of things.”

Mrs Friedman said photographing teens in Bermuda was a great experience.

“It was fantastic,” she said.

She has taught photography at Ryerson University, but now teaches English as a second language and works in commercial photography.

Her fine arts photography has shown in Toronto, Rochester, New York and Nova Scotia.

She is hoping that her Bermuda teen portraits might be shown in Canada, at some point.

Her exhibition opens tomorrow at Masterworks in the Rick Faries Gallery from 5.30pm to 7pm and will run until June 23.