Derek Ridgers

Ridgers has photographed the British fetish club scene, from the early days of its inception as a little-known underground scene – for example, the start of the Skin Two club in 1982, which was first held in Stallions nightclub in Soho – up until the Skin Two Rubber Ball and quasi-mainstream acceptability. His work also appeared in Skin Two magazine under the editorship of Michelle Olley. She wrote of his book (Stare) of this work:

Ridgers had already collaborated with the writer James Brown 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. Ridgers was present at the inception of a magazine that at its height sold 400,000 copies a month.

While Meadows' subjects revealed themselves as gauche, inhibited and curious, Ridgers's young men and women inhabited the camera's gaze as performers in a very particular arena. But it was the ordinariness that he glimpsed in these costumed characters that makes his photographs so powerful – the people he photographed wore beauty like a mask. The worlds that Ridgers photographed were small ones, peopled by young men and women who were captivated by the idea of image. His photographs do not search souls, they look at surfaces; these are not so much portraits as documents. . . . His subjects knew the rules of photography, knew not to smile or gesticulate – they were always still, needing to be recorded, longing for celebrity. Ridgers's photography captured the transitory nature of culture, a fleeting glimpse into what arrives, passes and is gone.

Ridgers's early photography of skinheads led to several situations where he was personally at risk from some of them until he became accepted as an observer. They were approachable and friendly. Many of these photographs were later collected in the book Skinheads (2010).

As well as photographing a wide range of musicians, actors, writers and athletes, during his long tenure as a cover/features photographer at Loaded Ridgers would first establish his own page of club photographs called 'Getting Away With It', which would run for fifteen years until 2010, one of the longest running features in the magazine's history. Many of these black and white fetish club scene photographs were later included in the book Stare: Portraits from the Endless Night.

In 2010, Ridgers collaborated with designer and printer Danny Flynn in an exhibition at Ketchum Pleon entitled Every Bodies Enemies. The pieces combined Ridgers's 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, custard and raspberry powder.

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 British champion Dave Ulliott ('Devilfish').

Morrissey used one of Ridgers's skinhead portraits 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 'Madstock' Finsbury Park gig of August 1992.

When We were Young: Club and Street Portraits 1978 – 1987. collects together portraits 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 while still unknown.

One of the first concerts at which he took photos was by Ron Wood, Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend at the Finsbury Park Rainbow, 13 January 1973.

The emergence of punk rock in the late 1970s fascinated Ridgers. 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. Ridgers used 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. He had an exhibition at the ICA in 1978.

Born in Chiswick, West London, Derek Ridgers trained as a graphic artist at Ealing School of Art 1967–71, and where one of his fellow students was Freddie Mercury. Ridgers's love of music led him to attend many live events of the time, one of which was The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream.

Derek Ridgers (born 20 October 1950), is an English photographer with a career spanning over thirty years. He is best known for his photography of music, film and club/street culture – photographing people such as James Brown, The Spice Girls, Clint Eastwood and Johnny Depp – as well as politicians (Tony Blair), gangsters (Freddie Foreman), artists (Julian Schnabel), writers (Martin Amis), fashion designers (John Galliano) and sports people (Tiger Woods).