The invention of the ‘teenager’ in the 1950s was a global, almost simultaneous phenomenon. Defined by groups of youths rebelling against the expectations of their parents and wider society in their behaviour, attitudes and clothing, movements sprang up in America, Australia, Japan and beyond. Identifiable by their clothes and the music they’d play, these youths revelled in a post-war freedom not enjoyed by the previous generation.

In the United Kingdom, one facet of this newly emerging youth culture was working class youngsters adopting the formal and flamboyant tailoring of Edwardian dress. Known as the ‘Teds’ (nodding to the Edwardian era their look was borrowed from) their jackets – often sumptuous velvets – had wide notched lapels accessorized with a skinny tie or bootlace, and they wore brothel creeper shoes on their feet. “The Ted swaggered with it all out front, male sexuality overt,” wrote journalist Richard Smith. As well as a way of dress and a style of music, owing to several high-profile incidents, the Teds were also associated with wayward and yobbish behaviour and public fights that led them to being banned from some venues.

Trends die, music moves on and teenagers become adults. More youth culture movements would follow, but with them would come a surprising phenomenon of recycling. In a move that on the surface would seem somewhat at odds with the maverick trailblazer idea of youth in revolt, many youth movements have had subsequent second waves. For example, Brit Pop in the 90s borrowed many of its fashion cues from the music and social movement of Northern Soul in the 70s. Some twenty years after the arrival of the Teds, a second wave of young people, who were often not yet born when the original wave hit, began aping the style, music culture and attitudes of their Ted forebears.

Chris Steele-Perkins, along with writer Richard Smith, were commissioned by the now-long defunct New Society magazine to cover the second wave of the Teds for a story, which grew into a self-motivated study of the British youth movement over several years. Steele-Perkins, who at the time was donning a more relaxed style and long hair, remembers the first wave of Teds when he was a child in the 1950s: “Each town had its own Teds who hung around on street corners smoking and sort of grunting at people. My father would rail against them and threaten to turn me over to them if I didn’t behave myself. Maybe that helped to drive my curiosity when I was older.”

“The gear: it’s smart; it’s great stuff; it’s much smarter than flared gear. The hair: it’s tidy; it’s not long and straggly. You walk down the street and you get all the old people – the original people who was there in the fifties – looking at you and saying, ‘Ah, look there’s Teddy Boys’.

You get great screws from people. You get people looking at you as if you were really brilliant like, as if you were really great,” said a Ted who spoke to Richard Smith.

Since the Teds put so much effort into crafting their look, they were expectedly keen to be photographed – “Well, they weren’t there to be ignored; that wasn’t their vision of themselves in life,” says Chris Steele-Perkins. However, this presented its own challenges as the photographer had to work around their propensity to peacock in order to capture genuinely candid shots. “You had to then get to the point where they didn’t just pose for you,” he adds.

What Steele-Perkins’s photography shows, corroborated by Richard Smith’s writing from the time, is that the Teds second wave was more than just a way of dressing but a lifestyle. We see evidence of the characteristic Teds attitude filtering through to the way youths behave, socialize, interact with and even romance each other in his photographs. Chris Steele-Perkins muses on what separates a subcultural youth movement from a fashion trend:

“It’s the roundedness of it, it has a slang, a code, a dress code, a sort of knowledge of certain areas, esoteric areas that might be rockabilly music, for example. With (1970s UK music and culture movement) Northern Soul, it was obscure songwriters, for example. It could include a dance style, or a way to dress – all those little cultural tick boxes. It becomes part of their identity. You’re a somebody as opposed to the bricklayer or the butcher’s boy; you’re this guy that people think look fancy and they might be frightened of you just because of the clothing you’re wearing.”

One critique often lobbed at the study of fashion and teen culture is that it is frivolous, but, as Steele-Perkins explains, it, like an anthropological study of the teen species, reveals a significant amount about the society from which it emerges. “What I tried to do was to document a subculture, and quite a major one in British society,” says Steele-Perkins. “I went into their homes and documented them in all kinds of contexts, and the clothes, in the end, become relatively peripheral to the whole thing. I’m not interested in them per se, they’re part of the package. And it’s like most things, leather jackets, you know, it all fades away. It’s much more about identity and who we are.”

This attitude is emblematic of Steele-Perkin’s lifelong photographic approach; it’s what draws him to photograph the subjects he does: families, sports, cultural gatherings, microcosms. “That’s why I photograph England, in particular,” he says. “All my working life I’ve been drawn to these small worlds which have the whole world in them. It could be the Teds, it could be Holkham estate (a private aristocratic estate in North Norfolk); it’s pretty similar in terms of it being a world within a world with its own rules and its own codes.”

Material taken from Magnum Photos website.

In other news, Rick Owens Fall 2021 Men's. “I’m always conscious of my own aggression. And the older that I get, I feel like I should have reached a level of serenity that I just haven’t; I get impatient, I get itchy, I snap at people sometimes… Aggression is something that I’m fascinated with because I’m constantly conscious of wrestling with it, personally. And I think that that’s true of every man.”

Chris Steele-Perkins on why photographing teen subcultures is so much more than style over substance.

Chris Steele-Perkins Racists give Nazi salute in London. England. G.B. 1980.

Lewisham, London, 13 August 1977. 500 members of the far right National Front plan to march across the borough and into its town centre; about 4,000 counter-demonstrators have come out to stop them. About 5,000 police are in attendance but by late afternoon pitched battles have broken out on the streets. 56 police officers are injured and 214 people are arrested; police riot shields are used for the first time on the UK mainland. Here, pictures by Chris Steele-Perkins and Peter Marlow show that heavy-handed policing of counter-protestors was as much a part of the story as the activities of the far right minority on the day.

Peter Marlow Race Riots in Lewisham. Police making an arrest. England. London. GB. 1977.

It’s an event that came to be dubbed The Battle of Lewisham, and seen by many as a high-water mark for far right activity on British streets. But, says Steele-Perkins, it didn’t seem like it at the time. There on the day, “running around, trying not to get hit”, he thought it could be part of an ongoing spiral into chaos.

“It was out of control!” he says. “It was a kind of peak in London, of that kind of fighting in the street between the police and the demonstrators, but there wasn’t any sense that that was the case at the time. I thought it would go on for years.

Chris Steele-Perkins Rioters held back by police at National Front Demo. London. England. GB. 1977.

Chris Steele-Perkins Injured policeman during a National Front Demo. London. England. GB. 1977.

Chris Steele-Perkins National Front Demo, anti fascism graffitti. London. England. GB. 1977.

“Part of the idea I had at the time was that civil disturbances could escalate into the situation we had in Northern Ireland,” he adds. “The streets in west Belfast were battle zones with soldiers with live ammunition on the corners, and I thought this could happen in mainland Britain.”

Steele-Perkins kept on photographing far right supporters throughout the 1980s, capturing images that still look disturbing today. Those who turned out onto the streets to support views such as ending immigration and repatriating all settled immigrants to their ancestral homelands sported shaved heads and White Power t-shirts, and were happy to be photographed giving Nazi salutes.

The images are accurate, he explains, but they only tell part of the story and he thinks they’re less effective because of it. “The far right is depicted in photographs as the burly boys because it’s easy to do it that way,” he says. “Skinheads shouting perhaps looks more intimidating than people with long hair shouting.”

Chris Steele-Perkins White racists from the British movement in East London. London. England. G.B. 1981.

In taking these photographs, Steele-Perkins was following a long tradition for Magnum Photos, whose members have documented those on both the right and left of the political divide since – well, since the very start. The work Magnum co-founder Robert Capa brought with him from the Spanish Civil War and from World War II showed exponents of radically disparate views, from the International Brigades in Madrid in 1936–1938, to a French Nazi-sympathizer who had her head publicly shorn upon the Liberation of Paris in 1945.

Other photographers at Magnum have continued to carry this baton, with Eve Arnold capturing members of the American Nazi party listening to Malcolm X in 1962, and Bruno Barbey showing a far-right demonstration in Paris during the more famously leftist protests of 1968. But today Steele-Perkins is critical of the images he took of Britain’s far-right, describing them as “short hair shorthand”.

The racist skinhead subculture depicted in Steele-Perkins and Berry’s images grew out of an earlier, broader skinhead culture originating in the late 1960s amongst young working class people in London, predominantly living in multicultural areas, who were influenced by mod and Jamaican rude boy fashion. In the ‘80s, political affiliations amongst skinheads diverged, with a far right fringe attracting extremist and racist individuals — it was this group which in much of the public’s view came to be most associated with the wider skinhead aesthetic.

Ian Berry Skinheads at a Chelsea v. Crystal Palace football match. London. England. G.B. 1980.

Steele-Perkins recognizes the dangers of focusing on aesthetic tropes.“The real problem is the people who don’t talk – the political classes behind it are really to blame. The others are just foot soldiers, some of whom are not too bright and just want to get into a rumble. […] This is where photography and representation have a problem,” he adds. “The message is maybe not carried in the picture in same way [if it doesn’t show a skinhead].”

Steele-Perkins, for his part, says he got “a bit fed up with photographing skinheads”, though he adds the he could continue doing so “because it’s still going on”. Recently he’s undertaken a project focusing upon the other side of the story of multiculturalism in the UK, this time in much broader terms, working on a huge project titled The New Londoners. The work, which was made over four years, saw Steele-Perkins photographing individuals and families from 187 countries around the world who have made London their home. “I hope it’s a more nuanced way of dealing with immigration,” he says.

He adds that he doesn’t believe photography can change anything – but that he does believe it can it can stand as a record, and he hopes that The New Londoners will do just that in the future. By the same logic, he also defends photographers’ right to photograph far-right supporters, even if the sentiment they’re interested in shooting is not always visible.

“I think one should do it to keep people informed if nothing else,” Steele-Perkins says. “But I guess I’m not that interested in doing it. I find the company difficult to keep.”

Three Magnum photographers reflect on their experiences photographing extreme anti-immigrant sentiment in the British Isles, and the dangers of focusing on aesthetics when documenting the right-wing.

SHORT HAIR SHORTHAND: THE FAR RIGHT IN THE UK THROUGH THE MAGNUM ARCHIVE

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