A Photographic Life - 45: Plus Derek Ridgers

A Photographic Life

In episode 45 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering applications for the UNP mentorship programme, online paid reviews, and how to price prints to sell. Plus this week photographer Derek Ridgers takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ Derek Ridgers, is an English photographer with a career spanning over thirty years. The emergence of punk rock in the UK in the late 1970S fascinated Ridgers and amongst his first published work were pictures taken at punk gigs at the Hammersmith Palais, London. During this time he photographed Adam and the Ants, The Slits, Penetration, The Clash and The Damned, work exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1978. Ridgers became a professional photographer and began working regularly for music and style magazines such as the NME and The Face as well as documenting the British fetish club scene. He also began to photograph music and film stars of the era, for national newspapers and other publications, such as Frank Zappa, John Lee Hooker, The Ramones, Prince, The Spice Girls, J. G. Ballard, Richard Harris and Martin Amis. As well as photographing a wide range of musicians, actors, writers and athletes, during his long tenure as a cover/features photographer at Loaded magazine Ridgers established his own page of club photographs called Getting Away With It, which ran for fifteen years until 2010. Many of these black and white fetish club scene photographs were later included in the book Stare: Portraits from the Endless Night. His book 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 the late eighties; many, like Boy George, Steve Strange and Spandau Ballet, photographed whilst still unknown. Ridgers has worked for Time Out, The Sunday Telegraph, NME, The Face, Loaded, The Independent on Sunday, The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, GQ, GQ Style, Melody Maker and Sounds. www.derekridgers.com You can also access and subscribe to these podcasts at SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/unofphoto on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-photographic-life/id1380344701 on Player FM https://player.fm/series/a-photographic-life and Podbean www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/i6uqx-6d9ad/A-Photographic-Life-Podcast Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer in Professional Photography at the University of Gloucestershire, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. He is currently work on his next documentary film project Woke Up This Morning: The Rock n' Roll Thunder of Ray Lowry www.wokeupthismorningfilm.com. His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay has been screened across the UK and the US in 2018 and will be screened in the US and Canada in 2019. © Grant Scott 2019