A career spanning Monograph looking at the very best portraiture of a distinguished career covering music, film, popular culture, sport and fashion. Derek Ridgers is one of the UK's foremost portrait photographers with a career spanning forty years. He is best known for his photography of music, film and club/street culture - photographing everyone from James Brown to The Spice Girls, from Clint Eastwood to Johnny Depp. During his career, Ridgers has worked for many publications, including Time Out, The Sunday Telegraph, NME, The Face, Loaded, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Independent, GQ Style and Arena.

"Taken in the streets, clubs, basements and bars of London between 1978 and 1987, this new book brings together an incredible series of images from the British photographer Derek Ridgers. People dressing up and going out have always been central to Derek's work from the first days of punk through to the fetish and fringe scenes of present day."--Publisher's website.

It was an incredible year; probably the last time a youth subculture would grow to have such a huge, worldwide effect. And it all started with a few kids in The Roxy, a scruffy, one-time gay bar in London's Covent Garden. I was lucky enough to be there to capture it. But it wasn't always easy.

For some, heaven will not be a perpetual dawn but rather an endless night - an eternity of the wild hours between dusk and sunrise.The Dark Carnival is a celebration of human beings given the rare space to play out their fantasy visions of themselves, the fleeting impressions of people dressed up for the glorious night caught in all their decadent glory. A unique collection of portraits personally selected by one of the UKs foremost portrait photographers covering alternative London's unique counter-cultural history from Punks, New Romantics, Goths, Disco Queens, Soul Boys, Fetish Worshippers, Rockers, Cyberpunks, Ravers, Clubbers and Party Animals. Derek Ridgers has been a feature in the clubs and on the streets of the capital for over 50 years - indulging in his obsession for documenting the people dressed up for the glorious night.Anyone who loves street style, youth subcultures, portrait photography and the curious human penchant for playing dressing up, will find this collection a darkly fascinating celebration of both night life and decadence.Packed with images exploring DIY fashion, self-expression and the fabulous strangeness of the human animal, ravers of all kinds will spend happy hours gazing at this book, at once a piece of social history and a visual poem, an expression of the fascinations of the author, a feast of luscious crepuscular imagery.

'It was the best of times it was the worst of times.' Maligned, misunderstood and fetishized the 1980's stands as the decade when post-modern life began in the west, and London was at the epicenter of this shift. An explosion of creativity took place against a backdrop of radical social change. London became a city of tribes. The vast youth culture categories of the preceding decades shattered into shards. It was the decade that sub-culture as a way of life reached it's zenith before giving way to it's inevitable scene surfing conclusion. Ridgers documented this cultural moment obsessively. Punks, post-punks, cyber-punks, gothic punks, mods, hard mods, Trojan skins, racist skins, ska, reggae, dub, early electronica, synth pop, acid house, happy hardcore, Blitz Kids, New Romantics, Hip-Hop, Rap, Electro, Break Beat, Techno, Rave - these were all sub-cultural spaces with scenes attached in London in the 1980's. Unlike now, subcultures in the 1980's were not casual playthings - they were a way of life for their participants. They inspired profound loyalty. They were a beautiful a doomed flowering of the hope for a better world. Derek Ridger's exquisite street portrait photography has captured this creative decade beautifully.

The true skins have never gone away.Skinhead is the only British style tribe that still genuinely scares people. From the dancehalls to the football terraces, from the local pub to the tower blocks working class teens in the late 1960's found their own form of rebellion.

The new collector's edition of Derek Ridgers' 78-87 London Youth includes a numbered C-print, signed by Ridgers, titled "Tuinol Barry, Kings Road 1983." Taken in the streets, clubs, basements and bars of London between 1978 and 1987, the photographs in this volume celebrate the many mutations in London's youth culture. Ridgers (born 1950) has documented the perennial youth ritual of dressing up and going out since he first picked up a camera in 1975. These photographs capture punk's evolution into goth, the skinhead revival and the New Romantic scene, and the eventual emergence of Acid House and the new psychedelia. Among those portrayed are Boy George, Neneh Cherry, Leigh Bowery and his boyfriend Trojan, Michael Alig, John Galliano, Hamish Bowles, Cerith Wyn Evans, Steve Strange, and Martin Kemp and Steve Norman of Spandau Ballet.