- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Photoworks (1 Jan 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 190379613X
- ISBN-13: 978-1903796139
- Product Dimensions: 23.8 x 16.2 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 332,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
Over a period of ten years, from 1978 to 1987, British photographer Derek Ridgers painstakingly recorded the young inhabitants of London’s streets and Soho’s fashionable club scene.
His resulting portraits of skinheads and the extravagant and exotic figures of the post-punk,‘New Romantic’era are a remarkable and fragile social document, a record of an incredibly inventive yet excessive youth culture.
Many of Ridgers’s young subjects, such as Boy George and Steve Strange, went on to achieve fame and wider notoriety, but here they exist together in a self-regarding but vulnerable sub-culture, wan angels of the London night.
As writer and curator Val Williams says in her essay for the book:‘Derek Ridgers’s compulsion to photograph London clubs over two decades was an extraordinary one.
He has produced thousands of remarkable photographs of remarkable people, transient beings moving across an urban landscape, experimenters, flamboyant souls who cared more than anything about how they looked and whose greatest fear was of being ordinary.
But it was the ordinariness that Derek Ridgers glimpsed in these costumed characters that makes his photographs so powerful.
‘Ridgers’s photographs are an undeliberate chapter in a decade of English social and cultural history which changed the way we thought about music, fashion and consumption. It was the decade of the handmade and the customised, of Oxfam shopping, conspicuous sexuality, of excess, wide success and dismal failure.
Played out against the backdrop of a rapidly changing London cityscape and a revolution in politics and economics, the style cultures that Derek Ridgers photographed meant far more than style.’
This book brings together Ridgers’s extraordinaryphotographs for the first time. Part photography monograph, part fashion history, part momento mori,this beautiful book also encapsulates the essence of Ridgers’s work and his influential role as quiet observer and collector of British street style.
From the Author
Derek Ridgers’ compulsion to photograph London clubs over two decades was an extraordinary one.
He has produced thousands of remarkable photographs of the remarkable people, transient beings moving across an urban landscape, experimenters, flamboyant souls who cared more than anything about how they looked, whose greatest fear was of being ordinary.
But it was the ordinariness that Derek Ridgers glimpsed in these costumed characters that makes his photographs so powerful, wearing beauty like a mask.
Ridgers' photographs are an undeliberate history of a decade in English social and cultural history which changed the way we thought about music, fashion and consumption.
It was the decade of the handmade and the customised, of Oxfam shopping, conspicuous sexuality, of excess, wide success and dismal failure. Played out against the backdrop of a rapidly changing London cityscape and a revolution in politics and economics, the style cultures which Derek Ridgers photographed meant far more than style.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Viewing these portrait and street images brings back memories of a different world and time. Anyone who grew up with punk in their teens will feel nostalgia seeping into their blood! (I never figured a rush of memories would make me feel very sad and actually miss those times). The portraits reveal more than just hair style and fashion sense of those late seventies and eighties. They reveal a group of people living at a time when Thatchers' Britain was a difficult place to be. Particularly for the young, socially separate (and desperate) trying to find a place within society. The photographs in this book are very reflective and capture a great deal of information. Posing for the camera may have be instinctive for the subjects - the smiles, the arrogance, the struts, the attitude - but just look at the eyes and you see a true picture of their lives. This is a great book and, in a way, an invaluable record of an almost lost generation. I highly recommend it if you can find it.
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