Where did the idea of the teenage bedrooms come from?
It was a cumulative thing really. I have a daughter who isn’t quite a teenager yet, but she’s started to create her own space in her bedroom. You watch someone trying to make their own identity. So that was obviously curious to me. And there’s a great book called Londoners In Their Homes, which is really nice, and a few other photographic projects by people like Martin Parr about people’s environments, which I’ve always been interested in. But the main thing was that I sometimes go down my local pub in London at and there’s quite a lot of people that drink in there who don’t have children and I realised that their perception of teenagers was very negative, to the point at which they seemed to think my ten-year-old would already be doing crack, ram-raiding and having gang bangs. It made me think that we lump all teenagers together in a way that you would never do with adults. You would never say, “all adults are aggressive” or “all adults are argumentative”. But we make teenagers into o
