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[title]‘On some nights it was like walking into a Hieronymus Bosch painting,’ says Derek Ridgers, recalling the early days of the Camden Palace in the early eighties. ‘It was incredible.’
Ridgers worked as a nightlife photographer for Time Out from 1981 to 1987, running into George Michael about town and Liz Hurley at the Batcave, hopping from venue to venue wearing a simple pair of jeans and a T shirt. ‘I went from skinhead places earlier in the evening to late-night places in Soho with the New Romantics and I’d be equally out of place wherever I was,’ Ridgers says. ‘I never wanted to blend in anywhere.
‘Soho was completely different in those days. It was full of scruffy little clubs that really don’t exist anymore in quite the same way. Often they weren’t really supposed to even be clubs, they were odd spaces out the back or basements or up some stairs.’
In his new book, The London Youth Portraits, Ridgers catalogues the faces of punks, skinheads, new romantics and everyone in between, painting a multilayered portrait of London youth culture on the streets and in the club between 1978 and 1987. It showcases previously unseen images from Ridgers’ archive, including several photographs which were originally taken for Time Out.
‘There’s often not much thought that goes behind picking someone,’ he says, speaking about the people in the pictures. ‘I just see someone and in an instant think, yes: that person. The stories are very often written on the faces of the people that I photographed.’
Check out some of the images below.
Join Derek Ridgers on May 23 at the Photographers Gallery for the launch of The London Youth Portraits.