Skins

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It’s incredible that [the far-right] could take something that was so inclusive and weaponise it to divide people’ – Gavin Watson

Brief History of British Subcultures | PORT Magazine A Brief History of British Subcultures | PORT Magazine

Watson’s work is notable for a few reasons, not least the tenderness he lends to a group long vilified in the media. His pictures feel real because they bring us inside a circle of friends the same way we might experience life: variances of closeness and distance, a metered consistency of looking, tinges of sentiment belied by pragmatism. In short, the end of youth.Skinsby Gavin Watson is arguably the single most important record of ’70s skinhead culture in Britain. Rightly celebrated as a true classic of photobook publishing, the book is now reissued in a high-quality new edition under close supervision from the photographer. Watson and his friends were part of a concentrated, local community of skins with its own particular identity. “The council estate over the road was sort of the boundary. Our town was tiny. Our minds were tiny as well,” he says. “The skinheads in Aylesbury would be very different from the skinheads 15 miles away. It was very insular until we went to gigs and then you’d meet up with people.” Watson first encounted the Two-tone movement – which fuses ska, punk, and new wave – when he was 14, when he caught Madness on TV in 1979. 40 years on, Watson has come full circle with his new book Oh! What Fun We Had (Damiani), which launches at Donlon Books tonight and features never-before-seen photographs chronicling the rough-hewn kids who transformed skinhead culture into a global phenomenon. EJ: That’s amazing. I want to touch on music again briefly because it’s such an integral part of your work… Gavin Watson grew up in a typical working class overspill town that surround London. Stumbling into photography aged 14, becoming a skinhead at 15, he inadvertently documented the real social interracial music scene behind the media’s right-wing portrayal of a demonised youth culture. Undiscovered until the 1990s, his work became a blueprint for the work of filmmaker Shane Meadows, and significantly influences a generation of photographers working today.

In pictures: the multicultural roots of the skinheads | Dazed

Gavin Watson documented his friends as they came of age at the heart of a misunderstood community.” — i-D

Punk lent itself to violence through its embrace of aggressive music and teenage angst. Skinheads reflected this new influence by combining the exaggerated imagery of the original skinhead style with punk. First published in 1994, Gavin Watson’s inimitable publication Skins is one of the most renowned documentations of British sub-culture to date. Beginning his career aged fourteen after impulsively purchasing a camera at Woolworth’s, Watson’s photographs have inspired films, exhibited globally and most importantly, been shared between the people who stood before his lens three decades ago as a reminder of their glory days.

Gavin Watson “One image can change the history of anything” – Gavin Watson

Through no desire of his own, Watson eventually became known as one of the most prominent documenters of skinheads, his 1994 debut book Skins having served as primary source material for Shane Meadows’s iconic indie drama This Is England. Watson affirms that the film is more representative of his experience of the subculture than other on-screen portrayals, arguing that “there’s a political narrative with movies like American History X and Romper Stomper” that doesn’t resemble what he knew. Their style was an exaggerated version of the traditional unskilled laborer. One of the first scholars to research skinheads, sociologist Mike Brake, classified skinheads as a “traditional working-class delinquent subculture” and documented five traits that defined first-generation British skinheads: toughness and violence; football (soccer), ethnocentrism, Puritan work ethic; and a cynical worldview. Though he didn’t often venture far from his estate growing up, he’s rubbed shoulders with skins further field, like New York, where “you were always welcome”. He also developed an interest in skins beyond the Western world. When he started receiving images from “hardcore, covered-in-tattoos skinheads” in Southeast Asia, he wanted to travel there and photograph the burgeoning scene, but he claims nobody was interested in the idea because it doesn’t conform to what skinhead culture is typically defined as. What’s crazy to me is I took so many pictures,” Watson says on the phone from his London studio. “I couldn’t afford to do it. No one ever paid me to do it. No one ever saw the pictures. I just took them for no real reason, except that I enjoyed taking them.”

In England, there were two waves of the skinhead cult. From its inception, the skinhead subculture was largely based around music. The first group appeared in the late 1960s as an offshoot of the mod subculture and largely died out by 1972. We lived close to Wigan Casino and went as often as we could. The place was a dive, a pit of filth really but boy did they have a great sprung dance floor. I live now aged 60 with a skinhead haircut because its easy to manage. Music isnt played any more and "time will pass you by" is dead right. The growth of the right-wing National Front and its recruitment of youth merely increased the amount of conflict present in the skinhead subculture. Punk shows and Ska shows were marred by skinhead violence. Even American newspapers covered the race riots that exploded in London in 1981.