THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

An untitled collage from 1990 shows images of sex and death together with photographs and clippings of various “bad boy” rock stars from Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Thunders and Stiv Bators to boxers, the actor Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver, the comedian Lenny Bruce, Christ, and the porn star Annie Sprinkle, among others.

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I started mixing up all this teenage stuff – the perfect childhood done by Hollywood, by the media, by all the stuff we read and see, with the way childhood was supposed to be in the fifties when I was a kid, the way it wasn’t at all.

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I’d been seeing all these newspaper stories about kids murdering their parents but the kids didn’t look right.  They always looked twisted or older than seventeen, but this kid looked perfect.  He’s got his Motley Crue t-shirt, the jean jacket, the long hair, and just a wisp of moustache.  This is how I want a killer kid to look, like the kid next door.

Larry Clark in Monk/Trip, 1996