Bill Yates photographs Florida teenagers at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in Tampa

Photographer Bill Yates had an amazing photography project on his hands, but he just didn’t know it—for about 40 years. In 1972, Yates, then in his final year at the University of South Florida, spent seven months photographing young revelers at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in Tampa, Fla. He mostly forgot about the work up until recently, when he unearthed about 800 negatives from his archives and scanned them. The result is a delightful time capsule from a simpler, groovier era. “When I shot it, I was 26. I wasn’t thinking about documentation. I was just seeing something that looked interesting and somewhat out of the ordinary,” Yates said