So much is in midair. The daredevil dive from the bridge into the municipal river. A backyard trampoline jump executed with a kid sibling on the shoulders. A skate trick. A trio of grapefruits in the split second before they crash to the floor. A balloon. A BMX rider appearing to soar over the heads of onlookers, seemingly bound straight toward the palmetto tree. And then elsewhere: actually soaring over heads, crowd-surfing the mosh pit, being passed around by strangers. A handstand by the chain-link fence in a dark, littered yard, with a kid in the backseat of an Oldsmobile staring wide-eyed into the camera, dirt spattering the tires, car doors flung open, making frames within frames. The photographs explode beyond their edges.

In fact, they never stop moving. Wrestling on the couch. Pissing in the yard. Flipping off the camera. The loose and still-awkward teenage intimacy of hanging out, bodies accidentally brushing up against each other, tangled up in a twist, flopped on a mattress dragged out to the living room floor, jammed in a car together. The stolen makeout while pretending no one is looking. Spectacular, feral body language.

On first glance you might take these pictures for someone else’s—the hypothetical friend from your own group who is some kind of prodigy, uncommonly good at photography. Or someone who earned the trust of these teenagers. Someone who is able to photograph them from inside and outside, in the spirit of Susan Meiselas’s tumble of girls trying on lipstick and lighting smokes on Prince Street; or the fluid grace of Bruce Davidson’s toughed-out teenagers; or the raw, runaway, freedom-seeking closeness of Mike Brodie’s freight hoppers; or even the intimacy of Jim Goldberg’s street kids. But in the milieu of south Florida in the 1980s, it’s a sprawling family of seven biological siblings, safe at home and wild at heart.

Elsewhere in these photographs you will see expressions that are granted only to mothers—the front-yard pose before the prom, the shy glance from beneath a graduation hat, or the glare of a preteen, sullen and sweating in the passenger seat on a blazing day while clutching a single rose.

All these years, these pictures have been waiting for their time, tucked inside three pieces of living-room furniture. A world being seen that didn’t assume it was being seen.