The London Youth Portraits with Derek Ridgers
Interview by Esta Maffrett | 24.05.24
The seventies and eighties saw a boom in subcultural styles and sounds. The vast changes in culture came from young people as personal style became public panic. The new looks were paraded at pub gigs, basement clubs and across the streets of London.
Derek Ridgers portraits from this time are collected in the new book The London Youth Portraits, documenting identity turmoil as adolescents searched for their tribes.
Have you always been interested in people and did this lead you to become a photographer?
I don’t really know if I've always been interested in people. When I was a teenager and art student I didn’t even have an interest in being a photographer. Since I can remember, since I became a teenager, I’ve had a strong interest in music and through my teenage years I was going to a gig every week. I’d go as much as I could afford with my pocket money to begin with and then school grant. I didn’t have that much but I would often try to go to two or three gigs a week which in London was perfectly possible.
Then in 76 something different happened and punk started. I had began to take photographs of the musicians I was seeing but in 76 the fans became a bit more interesting than some of the bands visually. So I turned around. That was the beginning of it for me. Punks were aggressive looking but actually very friendly people who were easy to photograph and would give some good images.
The reputation of punks often forgets that they were just young people. What was the response you got when you started photographing the crowd instead of the band? How did the audience take it?
Mostly, the punks were fine. I think they wanted the attention and this was a long time before iPhones when everyone could photograph themselves. But some people wanted to be photographed and maybe end up in the paper. I didn’t work for a paper at that point but some of my images did get published to begin with in a photography magazine and they were in a show in 78 at the ICA. People were keen to see themselves, to get dressed up, go out, have fun and be seen. Being photographed was a part of that.
So these people are the focus of your new book that’s come out. What was the process you took to make it?
It started life when the publisher came to me and sxaid he wanted to republish a book that I’d done 10 years before called 78-87 London Youth. I wasn’t really keen on republishing that book which has already been reprinted so instead this book is based on that book but is very different. 80% of the photographs in this book are different from the other photographs. It’s funny because when 78-87 London Youth was published 10 years ago the publishers had come to me to do a reprint of my previous book. So instead of having had the first book reprinted 3 times I now have three books by three different publishers. It might sound complicated but it’s important to me.
I think it’s really important to say it’s a different time now so let’s do a different thing. Rather than redoing something with the same lens. So this book has unpublished work as well?
I would say probably 20% of the photographs are unpublished or haven’t been seen for a long time. It’s got all my best London Youth portraits plus a few more so it’s the best collection I think so far.
Of course you were photographing in London at the time but do you think subculturally there is a distinction that feels like a London identity in the book?
I’ve never been asked that before. The thing is, a lot of the kids that I photographed in London weren’t really from London and sometimes I’d follow them to Southend or Brighton or Margate on a bank holiday. So there’s a couple of photos in the book that weren’t taken in London.
I’m from West London and there are some parts of London that I used to go to where I felt more foreign than if I went to say Paris or New York where everyone’s from somewhere else. London’s maybe not my favourite city but it’s the only city that I could live in. I think that’s true of a lot of people who grew up in London. We’re stuck with it a bit like your football team.
Often we think finding a subculture is about finding an identity to conform to but your photos really reveal the way it’s about finding a space in which to explore and expand your identity. Was this something you felt at the time, that subculture was constantly in flux? Or did it feel about a fixed identity?
You know, none of this I thought about at the time. When I started photographing the punks it was just because I was interested in these lively people around me who I thought would make a good photograph. I didn’t really think about it, I didn’t take myself or my work seriously at all at that point. I started to photograph the skinheads and the New Romantics in 78 and took my work to show an editor of a photographic music magazine who explained to me what he saw in my photographs and how it fitted into what other people were doing and had done. It was then I thought to myself perhaps I should try a little bit harder, think it through more.
I had a show in 1980 of my skinhead photos in Chelsea which was very well attended. There were coach parties of kids coming to it. I interviewed some of the skinheads as well and was quite shocked by some of the attitudes that I found. But it still has taken years and the books and the interviews where people ask me about subculture before I’ve really started to think about identity and what people were doing. It was very much after the fact.
It’s true most young people are too busy being young to think about what it means to be young. Attaching meaning to life experiences is something we do with age. Young people are documenting their own youth culture everyday but they’re not thinking about doing it, they're just taking photos with friends.
Well it was really that for me, they weren’t my friends although I became friendly with many of the people I photographed since. I went out to photograph alone, I wasn’t with a gang, I wasn’t a part of anything really. I think that’s why people get together, they don’t feel a part of something where they’re living or where they go to school so they find other people. They find their tribe. I was probably always looking for my tribe. I found it a little when I went to art school but that was so multifaceted because everyone is similar but still different.
I think that searching for a tribe doesn’t really ever end even when you’ve found your people you’re always identifying as you move around. It sounds like you picked up a bit of the punk in terms of your attitude to photographing.
I’ve found that there was a little bit of me in quite a few of the people that I was photographing. I’ve always had a kind of affection or maybe empathy with young people who don’t know where they’re going. This was more true with the skinheads than anything else, a lot of them had some very strange political and social views, not the same as mine, I had empathy but chose to express myself differently.
In your photos I see a celebration of the club as a space that expands imagination and creativity? It’s in the new music being listened to, the hallways that become catwalks, the sofas where people would meet. How crucial was the club space for nurturing the subcultures of the 70s and 80s?
I think it was essential. It was where people could come in from the suburbs and meet other people like them. There wouldn’t be any other opportunity to meet, it wasn’t anything like you’ve got today where you can meet on the internet in an instance, no matter what your attitudes are you’ll find like minded souls on the internet somewhere. This is good in some respects but very bad in some other respects.
Even with communities meeting online we still need spaces for people to interact in person. There are huge benefits to meeting people we’re friends with and also the friction that comes with meeting people we don’t get on with.
Yes. There’s now lots of very different people and they find ways to clump together but the places aren’t there.
The Skin Two club that started in 1983 in Soho started in a gay club called Stallions which isn’t there anymore, in fact, the whole street isn’t there. It’s all been built over. So none of these old Soho locations or clubs are there and people have to search out new places because there are none ready made. A lot of clubs back in the 80s would allow people to take over on the monday when it would otherwise be quiet, hundreds would come. In the end they’d kick out the promoters and try to do it themselves but nobody would come, the clubbers went where the promoters were.
Were you seeing the same people in clubs or were fresh faces coming through regularly?
Some of the clubs were a little bit underground. Like Le Beat Route which was a really good club started in 1981, you had to be in the know because it wasn’t as well publicised as the Blitz or some of the others, it went on much later than the other clubs. Camden Palace used to attract a lot of tourists, it was big and they would let in anyone that looked good or even people that didn’t sometimes. People would read about it from abroad then come over and dress up in ways that they thought they should to get in. For me this was brilliant because everyone was very photogenic even when they got it wrong. I liked everybody, the regulars, the tourists and the people that only ever went once. The only people I didn’t like would be the theatrics of someone who would hire clothes just for the night, like fancy dress, I didn’t photograph them. You could tell the people just dressing up from the people who lived that life 24/7.
If you could put one object into the Museum of Youth Culture what would it be and why?
I struggled to be a part of something, I tried to be a bit hippy, a flower child, a bit of a skinhead which didn’t work because I had glasses and didn’t like fighting. So I suppose it would be something from my youth and I did have a beautiful green bell sleeved caftan with peak buttons down the front. I didn’t have it for long, I bought it from Carnaby Street which was the hippest place in the whole of London to buy stuff. Jimi Hendrix used to go there. I got that when I was probably 15 and when I got it home my dad wouldn’t even let me wear it indoors. I took it to school and sold it to a friend. The only time I ever wore it was in the shop to make sure it fit.
The London Youth Portraits is out now at ACC Art Books and on June 26th in the US.