"because my Visible Girls project focused on the young women it made them all feel really special because at the time there were hardly any pictures of girls on their own in subcultures."

There was a huge cross section of subcultures at that time, I think partly because the politics were so up in the air and everything was really quite brutal at the time. Thatcher had just got in and there was a lot of rioting, unrest and direct action. Youth with a little bit of money in their pocket were able to escape that reality, getting into subcultures meant they had their own world and Identity. Also at that time there was reason to escape your home life, quite a few of the girls were living in difficult situations and they treated the subculture as their family of choice rather than their family. Things were very different then in terms of Child Line and being able to be open about those kinds of abuses that we can talk about now, so the subcultures formed a safety net for a lot of the girls. It got the girls away from home because if you wanted to listen to music you had to go to a gig or to your mates house and put on a record, or go to a record shop and listen in a booth. There was much more emphasis on live music and experiencing music on mass. If you wanted to listen to Ian Dury and The Blockheads you had to be there at 9 o’clock at the Marquee on Thursday night and hopefully meet a few people there. I think now the experiences of music and subculture are much less intertwined, I had to go to all these venues to meet these young women and I had to talk to them about what I was going to do, often I was only with them for 20 minutes. I printed all these pictures at college and managed to get all the girls to come to the opening night where I gave everyone who came a print, it was a fantastic night. Probably 70% of the girls came, the mods, the skinheads and punks all there together, there wasn’t any kind of animosity. I think because the project had focused on the young women it made them all feel really special because at the time there were hardly any pictures of girls on their own in subcultures. if you go to see an exhibition of women usually it’s a fashion exhibition, there are hardly any exhibitions that are just of women being themselves, in the toilets, in their room, in their workplace or environment. How many exhibitions of just men are there? There must be hundreds.

You’d only ever hear about the fights between the rockers and the mods and all that, the news always focuses on the negative. Music has always brought people together. There was a lot of self expression and creating your own identity feeling safe that you were in a group or a subculture or with friends that supported you doing that.

It was really because I kept seeing pictures appearing on Facebook and social media that were being attributed to the wrong photographers. The Visible Girls were saying no Anita Corbin took those!! so in the mid 2010s I realised that I could actually revisit the portraits and the women.

I had tried to do it 10 years after when the girls were in their 20s but everyone had moved or got married and I lost touch so i couldn’t do it and got quite frustrated. I put it on the backburner and had my own family. When my children were growing up and leaving home I thought it was a really good time to start looking for the girls again. I did a press release with Buzzfeed asking for help to find the girls, within about 20 minutes I had four or five emails and calls from the original Visible Girls. My lab Metro Imaging helped me to scan all the original negatives and make beautiful new prints with so much more detail than I’d ever seen in the 80s, it was like a whole new exhibition. I saw things differently in the photos that I hadn’t noticed in my 20s, I saw characters and moods that were softer, in my 20s I was very much about ‘this is us and we are here, look at what we can do’.. back then I was much more conformist in terms of what the subcultural connections were, I didn’t use the portraits that were slightly less able to be categorised, so in the 2017 edit I selected some new pictures of lovers rock, the mods and the ska girls. There was much more diversity in the pictures than I’d selected originally because in my 20s I was on a mission to show something else, it’s really fascinating to revisit the original contact sheets.

Because the Visible Girls got in touch from all over the world for the new Revisited series I’ve been to the States, France and Slovenia, I still want to go to Australia and New Mexico to meet all these women where they are now living. Even now Visible Girls are still finding me and the reunions are incredible. This year I reconnected with Titch and Sylvia, the rockabillies and they hadn’t seen each other for 35 years. Women's friendships are so strong and so important, even after all those years they were just totally comfortable with each other. They used to be dance partners in rockabilly clubs and they still had it when we met up, they were still able to dance together. It’s lovely to be able to have that human element as well in the stories.

I grew up in London during the 1970s. I was very lucky to be in London at that time because it was much freer, I could travel around on my own, getting public transport to all the gigs that were going on that were relatively accessible and well priced. I would probably be out seeing music at least two or three times a week, live music and big bands, big names. Often I shouldn't have been in there because I was underage but you didn’t need ID then, it was a lot easier and freer for teenagers, as long as you didn’t get too leery you were fine. I was going out to gigs a lot and started taking a lot of pictures, I started photographing at 7 really but the gigs were later. When we were out and about I’d always have a camera, it was very much a part of my identity. When I was 14 I went to see Bowie with a schoolmate at Hammersmith Odeon, we sat right up at the back and the tickets cost £1.50. The lights went down and we could see from the back all these empty seats at the front in the royal circle. We ran down there just before Bowie came on stage, when he did the lights came up and we realized we were in the press box.! Rod Stewart was about five seats away from us and Bowie was right there in front of us but there was hardly anybody else in the box. Now there’s no way you’d be able to get that close like that and if there was a press box it would be packed out with photographers. It was the most incredible experience, we absolutely adored Bowie so it was like a dream being right in front of him. He was larger than life and the band was fantastic. The band and Bowie all had this androgynous nature, as a 14 year old girl it was amazing to see the way culture, music, style and fashion were opening up, London was very much ahead of the game on all those things. I remember the whole experience, it was before the death of the Ziggy Stardust era so there was no sadness at this point, everyone was just having the best time of their lives. If I had to put something into the museum it would be my worn out Ziggy Stardust album or the gig ticket. I went over to Rod Stewart in the interval and asked him very cheekily if I could get an autograph on the ticket….and he said yes!