The British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins died, in September, at the age of seventy-eight, after a groundbreaking and globe-spanning career, leaving behind a catalogue that ranges from images of war-torn Afghanistan during the mid- to late nineties to scenes from Japan in the early two-thousands. But Steele-Perkins, a member of the Magnum photo agency, was particularly attuned to discovering the alien, and the alienated, at home, in the United Kingdom. There, he was at once an insider—he attended Christ’s Hospital, among the country’s most prestigious boarding schools—and an outsider, having been born in what was then still colonial Burma to a British military father and a local Burmese mother. It made sense, then, that Steele-Perkins was drawn to the depiction of subcultures and the marginalized, or what he once described as “small worlds which have the whole world in them.” Among those he immortalized were the so-called Teds, the U.K.’s first recognizable tribe dedicated to teen-age rebellion, who became the subject of his first photo book, made in collaboration with the writer Richard Smith and published in 1979.
Barry Ransome in a pub called the Castle, on Old Kent Road, London, 1976.
Teddy Boys, as they were otherwise known, had emerged in Britain in the nineteen-fifties. They were working-class youths who scandalized mainstream society with their elaborate neo-Edwardian frock coats and drainpipe trousers, their outlandishly styled hair—a quiff up front, and a D.A., or duck’s arse, at the nape of the neck—and their skirmishes and ruckuses in dance halls and night clubs. By the late seventies, other youth subcultures had followed in their wake: the mods and rockers, the hippies, the punks. The Ted revival that Steele-Perkins captured in that period combined generational rebelliousness with a kind of doubled nostalgia: for both the teens and for the fifties, an era in which men still wore suits and women still wore dresses, and going out on a Friday night was an occasion for peacocking and parade. “A night out with the Teds was generally a good crack—sometimes some violence, some vomit on the carpet, but generally a rock’n’roll party,” Steele-Perkins wrote as he looked back at his time in their midst for an article that appeared in the Observer Magazine in 2003.
