Real Look at the Crew of ‘KIDS’ Growing Up | 90’s NYC: “At 14, it was as easy then to get beer at the bodega as it was liquor at the liquor store as it was to get weed, coke, or dope on my block.”

After 20-years the influence of Kids is still here. High and Mel were apart of the crew even if they didn’t end up in the movie. They lived the same Washington Square Park and Tompkins lifestyle and have the pictures to prove it. Their book/website That’s a Crazy One is here to remember those wild times because a lot of them didn’t make it out.

VICE took A Real Look at the Crew of ‘Kids’ Growing Up so check it out.

 

“The film looked the city’s youth culture right in the eye, depicting an alternative lifestyle of explicit sex, drug use, and violence. But though Kids captured something that felt important because it felt real, High and Mel don’t think it was real at all. In fact, they feel it was exploitative, that Clark capitalized on the brilliance of the crew while failing to capture the true beauty of their world. They weren’t as sex crazed as the film portrays them, for one. More important, in Kids, it seems all the boys want is to fuck the girls, but in real life, the girls weren’t sexual conquests. The boys and girls ran neck and neck and were best friends. 

More than 20 years after Kids, High and Mel have curated a selection of photographs they took of their crew in the early 90s. “High and I had photographed our friends for most of our teens, creating this full portrait of what so many people had tried to capture from the outside,” Mel writes, introducing the series. Their photos plainly documented their lives: a teenage boy on a windowsill in a hallway on E. 4th Street, the walls gouged and crumbling; High and Mel in torn jeans and torn tights on a St. Marks roof; a sleeping boy in baggy jeans on a Brooklyn-bound R train, sprawled over the seats as if in a bed.”

 

Photos by HIGHLYANN KRASNOW & MEL STONES