Derek Ridgers Skinheads 1979-1984

It was released for the publisher Omnibus Press book Skinheads 1978-1987, which includes over 100 photographs taken by Derek Ridgers, one of the most important documentarians of subcultures in recent history, fell in the streets and in the clubs of London to photograph a scene born in the 60s: the skinhead. 

Derek Ridgers is a British photographer who has photographed for over thirty years the British subcultures, from punks to "new romantics" going to the fetish scene in London in '79, while he was in the room of Soho "Billy's", was approached by a group of young skinhead who wanted to be photographed. Since then, for the next five years she toured the streets of London and the nearby coastal towns to tell the skinhead movement, born in the sixties in England and then spread throughout the world. Photos of Ridgers tell the "second wave of skinheads", ie those guys that at the end of the seventies had taken the spirit of punk in reaction to the androgynous style of so-called "new romantics", accompanied with a strong sense of belonging to the class and all 'political orientation, which could go from anarchy to positions openly fascist and racist. There was a real orthodoxy in terms of style and clothing. You could not go around dressed in the case, in fact, you had to wear only a certain type of brands: Dr. Martens, Ben Sherman or Crombie. 

"I was documenting this scene in the nascent local Soho 'Billy's' and one evening a group of about half a dozen skinheads came to meet me. They had seen me shoot and one of them, a boy named Wally, he asked me if I wanted to take some pictures to them. They seemed quite friendly and certainly not ashamed in front of the lens. I took a couple of shots, we started talking and Wally suggested that I go with the whole group in one of their trips to the seaside for the holidays. And so began the five years he photographed the skinhead," says Derek. 

The photos in the book ending in 1987 was the year when the rave scene was born, the year that he began to get the ecstasy, the end of an era.