THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Levi Siskin was a photographer who took hundreds of Polaroids of his friends in and around Fryup during the early 1990s.  Despite initial acclaim – Time magazine hailed his work for “freezing a moment in time”,  Siskin subsequently withdrew all his photographs from public view.  His friend and frequent muse, Heather Moreland, claimed that Siskin, unable or unwilling to destroy them, instead chose to bury them at an unknown location in Fryup forest.  Siskin was the subject of a documentary film, Finding Levi, about his life and work.

Siskin grew up on a remote hill farm where he lived a feral existence. He was orphaned or abandoned at an early age. He was discovered by a film crew scouting locations, and made brief appearances in a series of early Purple Wave movies. Siskin was given his first camera by the film crew after frequently stealing equipment from the set.

Siskin’s girlfriend, Heather Moreland, sold a small number of his photographs to Time magazine in 1992, including the famous ‘Bilberry Pickers’, featuring Moreland and Samantha Roxby picking bilberries, their bodies and underwear smeared purple. Their publication caused a sensation, but angered Siskin, who refused to release any more. Nevertheless, the relative fame afforded by his appearance in Time gave Siskin the opportunity to pursue further opportunities. He photographed the Fryup punk band, Punk Pirates, and chronicled his half-brother Roscoe Siskin’s trip to Las Vegas to fight for – and win – the world flyweight boxing championship. Siskin subsequently moved to London with Moreland. After the pair split, Siskin became addicted to drugs, fuelling his habit by photographing and starring in gay porn films. His last project was for Shaven Ravers in 1996. He died of an overdose the following year.

Siskin’s work was largely forgotten until it was referenced by Moreland in her 2010 book about their relationship, Fryup Kids. Moreland described how Siskin had responded to the Time magazine feature by gathering his remaining hundreds of Polaroids and buried them in a secret location in Fryup forest. The book contains ten previously unseen photographs, which Moreland claimed were given her as gifts. She cited her refusal to hand back the photographs as the cause of their break-up years later. Moreland implied that she knew the location of the photographs, but refused to reveal it. Moreland described how Siskin became an “insatiable chronicler” of their moorland escapades, “constantly chasing the elusive shot that captured the essence of their feral youth”, and becoming “crushingly frustrated” by his perceived failure.

Moreland’s book inspired the 2012 documentary film Finding Levi, which won a Golden Leopard for best documentary at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival. In the film, Moreland describes her life with Siskin, and leads the film crew on a futile search for the photographs. In 2014, an exhibition of the same name opened at the Fryup Institute of Contemporary Art (FICA), comprising a series of blown-up, blank Polaroids. Each exhibit included a short description of the ‘missing’ picture by Moreland. “In denying us the images,” wrote Moreland in the accompanying catalogue, “he succeeds in setting the imagination alight.”