British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins died in September at the age of seventy-eight, after a revolutionary and global career, leaving behind a catalog that ranges from images of war-torn Afghanistan in the mid-to-late nineties to scenes from Japan in the early 2000s. But Steele-Perkins, an employee of the photo agency Magnum, was particularly determined to spot aliens and alienated humans back home in the United Kingdom. There he was both an insider (he attended Christ's Hospital, one of the country's most prestigious boarding schools) and an outsider, having been born in then-colonial Burma to a British military father and a local Burmese mother. It made sense then that Steele-Perkins would be drawn to depicting subcultures and marginalized sections of society, or what he once described as “little worlds within which the whole world is contained.” Among those he immortalized were the so-called Teds, Britain's first recognizable tribe, involved in the teenage rebellion that became the subject of his first photobookcreated in collaboration with writer Richard Smith and published in 1979.
Barry Ransom at the Castle pub on Old Kent Road, London, 1976.
The Teddy Boys, as they were otherwise called, appeared in Great Britain in the fifties. These were working-class young men who shocked mainstream society with their elaborate neo-Edwardian frock coats and trousers, their outlandish hairstyles – bangs at the front and a DA, or duck back, at the back – and their skirmishes and commotion in dance halls and nightclubs. By the end of the seventies, other youth subcultures followed their example: mods and rockers, hippies and punks. The Ted revival that Steele-Perkins captured during this period combined generational rebellion with a kind of double nostalgia: for both the teens and the fifties, an era when men still wore suits and women still wore dresses, and going out on a Friday night was an occasion for peacock parades and parades. “An evening with the Teds was usually great fun—sometimes a little violence, sometimes vomit on the carpet, but overall it was a rock 'n' roll party,” Steele-Perkins wrote, recalling his time among them in an article published in The Teds magazine. Observer magazine in 2003.
