

Larry P.



You can thank Aaron Spelling for Adrienne Salinger’s amusing and poignant images of mid-1990s teens hanging out in their bedrooms, which were collected in a 1995 book called In My Room. In a recent interview with Huck Magazine, she noted that



I actually worked on that project for a long time. I started it on the West Coast, when I lived there, just out of frustration at the ways teenagers were being depicted. Because this was before the internet, this was before computers, and our reliance on television was huge. There weren’t a lot of outlets for people to represent themselves, especially young people. There was this TV show I remember around that time, Beverly Hills 90210, and it was just… it was just atrocious.



Every picture is accompanied with some testimony from the subject about his or her own life. Salinger gave her subjects the right to remove any statements that they’d be uncomfortable having appear in print, and they universally moved to strike the statements they’d made on one subject, namely, sex:



It was about three years after I had taken the initial photographs, and you know what’s interesting? They were all over legal age by the point that I talked to them again, and every single one of them vetoed my inclusion of anything about sex. So the book, oddly to me, has no sex in it. And the tapes are dripping with sex. Hilarious, teenage, crazy-ass sex.



If you’d like to see more of the images, a great many of them can be seen at Salinger’s well-designed website, where the images appear with the subjects’ autobiographical statements. Or you can just buy the book.





Jeff D.





Jono B.





Krissy P.





Leslie M.





Peggy B.





Rick V.





Robert L.





Joe H.





Gavin Y.





Jason C.





Dana L.





Danielle D.





Donna D.





Ellen L.





Fred H.





Brad S.





Colleen B.





Auto C.





Bob T.





Aimie D.





Alex V.



Previously on Dangerous Minds:

‘Teen Talk’ on early ‘80s L.A. punk

‘You’re in a lot of shit’: Parents bust teen house party, 1988

