Derek Ridgers Quotes

Anyway, the fetish crowd, compared to some of the people that hung out with the skinheads, was all pussycats.

To me, the counterculture was always what I grew up with the hippies in the late '60s. But, however you define it, it's really the excesses of youth and it's something that everyone goes through to some extent. Or if they don't, they should do.

That's one of the wonderful things about the whole process of photography - eye contact can be very revealing.

I went from being an underpaid ad man to quite a successful photographer in a very short time. Success breeds confidence and as soon as I got properly confident, I developed my own style. After that I never looked back.

When I gave up my office job and became a full-time professional photographer, my fortunes certainly improved markedly. We moved away from the council estate into our own house and for the first time in my life, I had a little spare money.

When I was starting, I was very much influenced by the straight up, eyes to camera style of August Sander. He is really the only one. Had I known then the work of people like Ken Russell, Vivian Maier, Helen Levitt, and Steven Berkoff, they would undoubtedly have influenced me too.

I preferred that option, where my camera (and by proxy, me) could look them straight in the eye. The way they reacted to me was always interesting. Sometimes hard young men would reveal vulnerability and a softer side. In the case of teenage girls, I often got a fascinating glimpse of the woman inside.

It's more about subtracting every single buck from the tourists that still flock there. Gentrification and the need for developers to maximize their profits from every square inch of the place means that there just aren't any scruffy little basement clubs left. Those scruffy little basement clubs were the areas lifeblood. Now, it's all penthouse flats and global brands. They destroyed the very thing that drew people there in the first place - it's superficial sleaziness.

Only a very small proportion of us take those excesses with us into later life. In the age before everyone had a camera, it was worthwhile, in my opinion, to record those excesses. Sometimes, many times actually, the young people I photographed were only dressed that way for one night; that one night that they got snapped by me.

Many nightclubs from this era were very loud and very dark. Plus some of the best ones were incredibly crowded. To begin with, I could seldom get back far enough to get people into frame from head to foot and when I could, people would be constantly walking in front of me all the time. Then I bought a 24-mm lens and only had to be four or five feet away.

My parents, though very loving, were not what one would ever describe as outgoing and therefore when I was young I was quite shy and socially awkward. Having a camera changed all that. It gave me an excuse to go anywhere and approach anybody.

Things are very different now because a lot of those little clubs don't exist. In Soho for instance, where nearly half my nightlife photographs were taken, it's rapidly changing. There isn't the same after dark frisson of excitement about the place any more.

The reason why so many of my photographs in the book were taken in stairwells and corridors was that that was the only bit of spare space available and, in some cases, the only place where there was enough light to see anything. Even then, it was often so dark that I couldn't tell which gender my subject was (not that I particularly cared) and too dark, before the era of autofocus, to focus. I had to find a light (or carry a torch) and pre-focus.