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GREENSBORO - The photos are telling. Look at them and you’ll see things you’ll recognize around our city.

There’s the familiar, like the frozen figures of Bicentennial Gardens. But there’s also the vice and violence of any city, any town.

The cigarette butts scattered in the grass. The beer cases stacked high. The lone bullet hole spider-webbed into a glass door.

They represent a teen point of view, inspired by the statistics that make up the teen life of Guilford County.

The statistics come from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the first of its kind in five years. It was spearheaded by the nonprofit Guilford Education Alliance, underwritten by a $25,000 grant from the Moses Cone Wesley Long Community Health Foundation and molded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Overall, these statistics show local teens are a well-behaved bunch. And the survey is pretty comprehensive. The answers given in November come from nearly 6,500 middle and high school students, ages 12 to 18.

Still, dig into those statistics, and you’ll see a percentage of teens with a dark side.

They have sex, fight, binge-drink — that is, down five or more drinks in a few hours — and have thought about killing themselves within the past year.

Scary.

The photos — all 36 in an exhibit called “Photovoice’’ — will be unveiled Thursday at the fifth annual Adolescent Health Advocacy Day.

Every one was taken by a teenager, and they believe the statistics because it’s the world in which they live.

Now, they just want adults to listen.

“They were young once 50 million years ago, but technology has changed, we have changed and our generation is the future,’’ says Teleza Genwright, a senior at Southern Guilford High. “So they need to listen to teenagers, especially the positive ones.’’

These 14 teens from nine high schools and one middle school all came from peer leadership groups that work with the Guilford County Department of Public Health.

Last summer, they worked with three professional photographers. They got a few pointers, grabbed a digital camera and scoured Greensboro for scenes, people and places that backed up what they thought of the survey.

They tapped into their creativity to find some real gems that carry titles that swing from the unemotional to the emotionally wrought.

Like “Togetherness’’ from Kourtney Cox, a freshman at Smith High. It shows a couple holding hands, an example of what she sees as a positive relationship where abstinence is the rule.

In Guilford County, one in five — 19.2 percent of high-school students surveyed — reported having sex before they turned 14. Kourtney has seen that firsthand. She has classmates who are pregnant. Kourtney is 14.

Or “Influenced to Perfection’’ from Teleza. It shows a slew of magazines, with need-to-be-skinny headlines. In Guilford County, 39 percent of all middle and high school students say they’ve tried to lose weight.

Teleza hears about that at school, about this need to be thin. But she says she never sees anyone in her school’s halls who looks anything like what she sees in those magazines.

Or “Filling Empty Holes.’’ That’s from Brook Jones, an eighth-grader at Brown Summit Middle School. It shows two pictures of a vacant building off Florida Street: a bullet hole in a glass door and a chain across a door handle.

Brook says she wanted to illustrate the need to stop gun violence. In Guilford County, the survey found one in five — 20 percent — of all high school students reported carrying a gun in the past month.

Ask her about that and Brook will talk about her friend in Arkansas. He was a boy named Jason. He was killed in a drive-by shooting. He was only 13.

“It’s not the way the pictures look, but the meaning behind it,’’ Brook says. “Take any picture, and you can ask six people about the meaning and you’ll get six different answers. But this (picture) gives my outlook seen through my eyes.

“But it’s not about what I’m saying. It’s who’s willing to listen,’’ she says. “I can say anything, but if no one wants to listen what is the point of speaking?’’

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com