Derek Ridgers

Derek Ridgers
Derek Ridgers
Background information
Birth name Derek Ridgers
Born 20 October 1952 (1952-10-20) (age 59)
Chiswick, London
England
Genres Photography
Art
Design
Occupations Photographer
Art Director
Years active 1971-present
Website www.derekridgers.com www.derekridgers.com/index www.facebook.com/derek.ridgers www.twitter.com/derekridgers

Derek Ridgers (born October, 1952), is an established and well-known English photographer with a career spanning over thirty years.[1] Most famous for his work among the milieu of music, film and club/street culture - photographing everyone from James Brown to The Spice Girls, from Clint Eastwood to Johnny Depp - as well as photographing politicians (Tony Blair), gangsters ('Mad' Frankie Fraser), artists (Julian Schnabel), writers (Martin Amis), fashion designers (Vivien Westwood) and sportsmen (Tiger Woods).

He has also compiled an almost unrivalled image archive during three decades of visually chronicling famous and sometimes influential British social scenes such as skinhead, fetish, club, punk and the New Romantics.

Contents

Early life

Born in Chiswick, West London, Derek Ridgers trained as a graphic artist at Ealing School of Art 1968-71, and where one of his fellow students was Freddie Mercury. Ridgers love of music led him to attend many seminal live events of the time: his first live gig was seeing Jimi Hendrix in a tiny London venue; he saw the only ever UK concert given by The Doors (at The Roundhouse); he witnessed the Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd and attended the famous Hyde Park free concert in 1969 by the Rolling Stones, two days after the death of Brian Jones.

Ridgers Zelig-like ability to appear at historic events was further enhanced when he attended one of the most famous counter culture events of the Sixties, a 'happening' called The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream.[2] This was a concert held at the Alexandra Palace, London, on 29 April 1967. This fund-raising concert for the International Times was organised by Barry Miles and John "Hoppy" Hopkins and was part-documented by Peter Whitehead in a film called Tonite Let's All Make Love in London.[3] Pink Floyd eveentually appeared right at the end of the show, just as the sun was beginning to rise at around five o'clock in the morning.

Ridgers appeared as a guest on Gideon Coe's BBC6 Music show on 21/06/2011 talking about his attendance at The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream [4]

Gideon Coe - 'Did it feel like you'd been at something extraordinary?'
Derek Ridgers - 'It did. But, the thing is, my gig-going started only in December 1966. I went to see Jimi Hendrix at the Ricky Tick [5] - a small club above Burton's the Tailors in Hounslow, opposite the bus garage.'
Gideon Coe - (laughing) 'So you started there! And next thing you know, this 14 Hour spectacular... and when did you see The Doors?'
Derek Ridgers - 'I saw The Doors, I think that would be at the Roundhouse.'
Gideon Coe - 'Their only UK gig ever.'
Derek Ridgers - 'Yeah, in '68 with Jefferson Airplane.' [6]


Following his art school eductation, Ridgers went into advertising where he worked as an Art Director for ten years. One of his clients was a camera company and he picked up the product and gave it a try. When he parted with the agency he decided to take up photography.

One of the first gigs at which he took photos was a Ron Wood, Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend concert at The Finsbury Park Rainbow, January 13, 1973. In his website blog, Ridgers reminisces about the night:[7]

“I just happened to have the camera and some film with me. The seats my girlfriend and myself had bought were terrible, almost the very back row, and it was like watching an ant performing on stage. So I thought - I’ve got a camera, why don’t I just go down to the front, climb into the pit and pretend to be a photographer? In those days there was virtually no security at rock gigs, so it was perfectly possible.

“So, rather unchivalrously leaving my girlfriend where she was, I ran down to the front and, effecting the air of someone who did this sort of thing for a living, hopped over the low wall and watched the rest of the gig from behind the borrowed Miranda. It was a tremendous buzz, being just a few feet away from some of my musical idols. Bathed in the same coloured lights as them and in front of thousands of people just like them, I could see and hear every little detail. And it was an infinitely more profound and worthwhile experience than sitting in the seats right at the back.

“And so, very gradually over the next couple of years, I started leaping over barriers and clambering onto stages and shooting live bands wherever and whenever I could...″

Professional career

Original skins photo by Derek Ridgers
Morrissey's request for a print
Morrissey on stage, Finsbury Park, 1992

Punk

The emergence of Punk Rock in the late Seventies brought to the fore two of Ridgers natural qualities: one, his fascination with and compulsion to photograph interesting outsiders, and, two, his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and to be there at the very beginning of a new movement.[8]

“Then something significant happened to me one night, in late 1976, at a Vibrators show at Kingston Poly. I was crouched on the side of the stage, about three feet to the side of the band’s speaker stack and, as soon as the band came on, the audience started to go crazy. It was my first live sighting of ‘punks’.

“And I felt a frisson of something that night and I wasn’t quite sure why. Apprehension certainly. The punks were ostensibly fairly violent looking and some were none too careful where they aimed their globules of phlegm. But there was something else too. There was an excitement, a rawness and a vitality about them that was completely different to anything I’d encountered before.

“I felt a compulsion to try to record of what I saw. So, a few weeks later, in December of that year, when ‘The Roxy’ (the UK’s first punk club) opened its doors in Neal Street, Covent Garden, I was one of those standing in the queue.″

Among his first published work were pictures taken on a second-hand Nikkormat, bought as a cheap camera to take to punk nights at the Hammersmith Palais. In keeping with Punk's spontaneous, make-do ethic, Ridgers took pictures using a flash on a home-made bracket. During this time he photographed a very early Adam and the Ants, The Slits, Penetration, The Clash and The Damned.[9]

Before long his pictures were attracting attention, and he had an exhibition at the ICA.

New Romantics

After leaving the world of advertising to become a professional photographer, Ridgers began working for music and style magazines such as NME[10] and The Face and building up a body of work that would help establish his reputation as one of the foremost documentarians of contemporaneous British pop and street culture. This reputation was founded on his work among the sub-culture of skinheads, Punks and New Romantics.[11]

“The Blitz Kids had already been all over every national newspaper, including a big spread (by Ridgers) in the Sunday Times Magazine… Boy George himself had been featured in a two page spread in the Daily Mail, about Bowie Night at 'Billy's', in 1978 nearly two years before.

“Bowie Night at 'Billy's' is often glossed over in the whole story but that was really where it all began. And the sort of feted media characters that Boy George, Marilyn, Steve Strange and Martin Degville eventually became, were mostly just overdressed yet rather shy teenagers during their time at Billy's. That's not to downplay it or them. Stepping down into Bowie Night at 'Billy's' was a little like walking through a Hieronymous Bosch painting but it was far more unselfconscious and hedonistic than Blitz ever was.

“And to my mind, the best club of the era was Le Beat Route, which managed to happily exist somewhat below the radar of media attention (other than mine, obviously) and from this observers point of view, seemed to be a lot more fun. I think I should mention that the seeds of the modern fetish club might have been sown back at Billy's as well. David Claridge, the guy that started the original Skin Two Club, used to go there as did many of the people who would become well known rubber and fetish wear designers in the '80s - like Daniel James.

“They really were remarkable and very creative times. Which ended, in my opinion, when Leigh Bowery's Taboo closed in 1987.″

Skinheads

Ridgers early documentation of the skinheads led to several situations where he was personally at risk from some of the individuals on the scene until he became accepted as an observer of the movement. Many of these photographs were later collected together in the book, Skinheads.[12]

It was after receiving a written request for a print from Morrissey (formerly of The Smiths), that one of Ridgers's skinhead portraits was later made famous by its use by the singer during his 'Your Arsenal' tour. As well as being used on the tour passes, the image was enlarged enormously and used as the stage backdrop for the tour and for Morrissey's now infamous Finsbury Park gig of August, 1992,[13] which led to accusations against the singer by the NME in an article often criticised since for its own inflammatory nature.

'When We Were Young'

'When we Were Young'
by Derek Ridgers

When We were Young: Club and Street Portraits 1978 - 1987.[14] collects together portraits that were to become some of the most iconic works in Ridgers canon, that of young skinheads, punks and New Romantics from the Seventies through to late Eighties; many, like Boy George, Steve Strange and Spandau Ballet were photographed by Ridgers whilst they were still unknown club kids.

In writing about When We Were Young, Val Williams, Director of Photography at the London College of Communication and exhibition curator at the Tate and the Barbican, states:

“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.”

Fetish

'STARE: Portraits of the Endless Night'
by Derek Ridgers

Alongside his well known documenting of counter- and sub-cultural tribes such as skinheads and punks, Ridgers has also for the last three decades become what is probably the longest-standing photographic chronicler of the British fetish club scene; starting from the very early days of its inception as a little-known underground scene - for example, Ridgers attended the start of the Skin Two club in 1982, which was first held in Stallions nightclub in Soho - and right up until the scene's much later emergence into 'super-club' category of the Rubber Ball and quasi-mainstream acceptability. His work was also featured in Skin Two magazine under the editorship of Michelle Olley.

And it was Olley that would provide the introduction to a later collection of Ridgers fetish club photography, STARE: Portraits form the Endless Night.[15]

'Those of us lucky enough to have seen even a fraction of his nightlife collection will testify to its cultural significance. Every midnight tribe is here – hippies, punks, ravers, goths, teds, mods and every pretty boy and dirty girl in between, shot in situ in their un-natural habitat. There’s also a strong showing from the sexed-up in-your-lens mischief makers that inhabit the demi-monde of fetish, fashion, sex and glamour establishments, mostly in London, but also around the globe.

'STARE still manages to bring the glamour vixens and club kids together, creating a heady mix of reportage and eroticism. Uniquely, this is ‘thrill of the moment’ erotic realism, coming as it does directly from the subject, and not the photographer. He shoots it as he sees it, which makes this a rare and precious record of a certain kind of cheekiness, at a certain point in the evening, at a certain time in history.'

An amusing if tangential aside to Ridger's connections to fetish culture occurred when, first, legendary fetish model, Betty Page was misidentified online as Ridgers girlfriend, which led in turn to yet another Betty Page, a writer for the NME (and actually the girlfriend of different NME photographer, Kevin Cummins), also being misidentified as a Ridgers girlfriend by the singer Momus.[16]

Portraiture

As well as his portrait-reportage work, Ridgers also began to amass commissions to photograph music and film stars of the era. Working at the time predominantly for NME, but also for other publications and national newspapers, over the years he has photographed artists as varied as Frank Zappa, John Lee Hooker, The Ramones, Prince, The Spice Girls, JG Ballard, Richard Harris and Martin Amis.

Loaded

Having already collaborated with the writer James Brown when they both worked at NME, when Brown left to become the editor and co-founder - with Tim Southwell and Mick Bunnage - of Loaded magazine, Ridgers was asked to contribute.[17] Yet again making use of his ability to intuit the zeitgeist and to spot an emerging cultural shift, Ridgers found himself present at the inception of a publication that would revolutionise the men's magazine market and go on to become one of the most controversial and biggest selling lifestyle magazine in the country, at its height shifting 400,000 copies a month - thus bringing Ridgers work to its widest ever regular audience.

As well as photographing a wide range of musicians, actors, writers and athletes, it was during his long tenure as a cover/features photographer at Loaded that Ridgers would first establish his own page of club photographs called 'Getting Away With It',[18] which would run for the next fifteen years (until 2010), becoming one of the longest running features in the magazine's history.[19] Many of these black & white fetish club scene photographs were later collected together in the aforementioned book, STARE: Portraits from the Endless Night.

By this time, Ridgers had amassed such a large number of anecdotes during his life as a photographer that as well as his regular 'Getting Away With It' page, Loaded also gave him his own page, The Derek Ridgers Interview, in which he told behind-the-scenes stories relating to many photo shoots over the years.

Publications

During his career, Ridgers has worked for many publications, including NME, The Face, The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, Time Out and Loaded.

Collaborations

In 2010, Ridgers collaborated with award winning designer and printer Danny Flynn in an exhibition of work at Ketchum Pleon entitled Every Bodies Enemies. The pieces combined Ridgers portraits of musicians, film makers and actors, such as Keith Richards, Kylie Minogue Nick Cave, Dennis Hopper, John Lee Hooker, David Lynch, Elvis Costello and Skin with Flynn's unusual screenprinting technique of printing using everyday powders such as sugar, salt and custard and raspberry powder.

Danny - Lynch.JPG


Danny-prints small.jpg
  • Danny - Hopper.jpg
  • Danny - Hooker.JPG
  • Danny-Costello.jpg


Every Bodies Enemies - exhibition with Danny Flynn, London, 2010

Books

Selected books by Derek Ridgers:[20][21]


Selected books featuring the work of Derek Ridgers:

  • Skinhead - by Nick Knight
  • Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis - by Christopher Breward
  • Fashion as Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion - by Eugenie Shinkle
  • New Romantics: The Look - by Dave Rimmer
  • Moshpit Culture - by Joe Ambrose and Chris Charlesworth
  • Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience - by Iain Chambers
  • In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification - by Victoria Pitts
  • Cultural Studies: Vol 1 - by James Donald
  • Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory - by Susan Margaret Broadhurst
  • The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion - by Malcolm McLaren, Paul Gorman, and Paul Smith
  • Rap Attack 3: African Rap To Global Hip Hop - by David Toop
  • Love Lust Desire - by Michelle Olley
  • Turquoise Days: The Weird World of Echo and The Bunnymen - by Chris Adams
  • Fetish: Masterpieces of Erotic Fantasy Photography - by Tony Mitchell
  • Vintage: Art of Dressing Up - by Tracy Tolkien
  • My Favourite Model - by Various [22]

Exhibitions

Derek Ridgers work has been exhibited internationally since the Seventies in cities as far ranging as London, Paris, Moscow, Adelaide and Los Angeles, and in venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Museum of Modern Art, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Museum of London, Britart Gallery, Selfridges and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Select exhibitions:

  • Punk Portraits - ICA, London (1978)
  • Skinheads - Chenil Studio Gallery (1980)
  • The Kiss - Photographers' Gallery, London (1982)
  • Contemporary British Photography - The Developed Image, Adelaide, (1983)
  • Les Mythes de nos Nippes - Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1983)
  • Moe de Vie - Moscow (1984)
  • The Face - Photographers' Gallery, London (1984)
  • Portraits - East Studio, Cantebury (1986)
  • One Man Show - City Centre Art Gallery, Dublin (1990)
  • NME Exposed - Terrence Higgins Trust, UK touring show (1995-6)
  • Rock and Roll Attitudes - Maison Europenne de la Photographie, Paris (1998)
  • Rock and Roll Years - Proud Gallery, Brighton (1999)
  • ICONS - National Portrait Gallery, London (1999)
  • Golden - Britart Gallery, London (2002)
  • Very Public Art - Selfridges, London (2003)
  • Black British Style - Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2004-5)
  • The London Look - Museum of London (2004)
  • How We Are Now - National Portrait Gallery, London (2007)
  • Club F**K 20th Anniversary - Antebellum, Los Angeles (2009)
  • Every Bodies Enemies (with Danny Flynn) - Ketchum Pleon, London (2010)

Trivia

Ridgers is a keen amateur poker player after developing his taste for the game when he covered the World Series of Poker in 2000 for Loaded magazine, photographing the event and the participation in it of the renowned British champion Dave Ulliott ('Devilfish').[23]

Ridgers is a lifelong fan of the English football team, Tottenham Hotspur, is a Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust board member, and has designed the Trust ads and literature.[24]

Subjects

Musicians, actors, writers, sportsmen and politicians that have been the subject of Derek Ridgers' photographs include:

External links

References

  1. ^ Archive, 2010, http://www.derekridgers.com/index/module/media/category/gallery%7CPortraits/start/0
  2. ^ BBC, 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/.../pink-floyds-14-hour-technicolour-dream/
  3. ^ IMBD, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062379/
  4. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0121wzn/Gideon_Coe_21_06_2011/
  5. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/berkshire/hi/people_and_places/music/newsid_8438000/8438782.stm
  6. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roundhouse
  7. ^ "The Ponytail Pontifications". Derekridgers.com. http://www.derekridgers.com/homepage/Blog/Entries/2010/5/8_Ron_Wood___Eric_Clapton___Pete_TownshendThe_Finsbury_Park_Rainbow%2C_London_1973..html. Retrieved 2010-07-12. 
  8. ^ "The Ponytail Pontifications". Derekridgers.com. 2010-05-10. http://www.derekridgers.com/homepage/Blog/Entries/2010/5/10_The_Rolling_Stones%2C_Earls_Court%2C_London_May_1976.html. Retrieved 2010-07-12. 
  9. ^ Derek Ridgers, 2010, http://www.derekridgers.com/index/module/media/category/gallery%7Clive/start/0
  10. ^ NME, archive, http://wwww.archivedmusicpress.wordpress.com/category/nme/
  11. ^ "The Ponytail Pontifications". Derekridgers.com. 2010-05-17. http://www.derekridgers.com/homepage/Blog/Entries/2010/5/17_Blitz_Club%2C_Covent_Garden%2C_London_1980..html. Retrieved 2010-07-12. 
  12. ^ Blurb.com, 2010, http://www.secure.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1117764
  13. ^ NME, 1992, http://www.motorcycleaupairboy.com/interviews/1992/caucasian.htm
  14. ^ Schaden, 2009, http://www.schaden.com/book/RidDerWhe03631.html
  15. ^ Bookfinder, 2007, http://www.bookfinder.com/author/derek-ridgers/
  16. ^ "click opera - October 5th, 2009". Imomus.livejournal.com. 2009-10-05. http://imomus.livejournal.com/2009/10/05/. Retrieved 2010-07-12. 
  17. ^ Independent, Time Hulse, 1997, http://www.independent.co.uk/.../james-brown-the-latest-edition-1234041.html
  18. ^ "Derek Ridgers Photo Gallery". Derekridgers.com. http://www.derekridgers.com/index/category/gallery%7COther%7CGAWI/start/0. Retrieved 2010-07-12. 
  19. ^ The Independent, Martin Deeson, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/how-we-all-got-loaded-565648.html
  20. ^ http://www.blurb.com/search/site_search?search=derek+ridgers&filter=all&commit=Search
  21. ^ "derek ridgers: Books". Amazon.co.uk. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=derek+ridgers&x=15&y=27. Retrieved 2010-07-12. 
  22. ^ http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/3936709319
  23. ^ "Derek Ridgers". Derek Ridgers. http://www.derekridgers.com/index/module/media/pId/102/id/942/category/gallery%7CPortraits/start/0/The-Devilfish;-Dave-Ulliott;-P.html. Retrieved 2010-07-12. 
  24. ^ "Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust - Members of the Board". Tottenhamtrust.com. 2008-10-30. http://www.tottenhamtrust.com/members.asp. Retrieved 2010-07-12. 

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