The emergence of punk rock in the late 1970s fascinated Ridgers. Among his first published work were pictures taken on a second-hand Nikkormat, bought as a cheap camera to take to punk nights at the
Hammersmith Palais. Ridgers used a flash on a home-made bracket. During this time he photographed a very early
Adam and the Ants,
the Slits,
Penetration,
the Clash and
the Damned. He had an exhibition at the
ICA in 1978. After leaving advertising to become a professional photographer, Ridgers began working for music and style magazines such as
NME and
The Face. Ridgers' early photography of skinheads led to several situations where he was personally at risk from some of them until he became accepted as an observer. They were approachable and friendly. Many of these photographs were later collected in the book
Skinheads (2010).
Morrissey used one of Ridgers' skinhead portraits during his
Your Arsenal tour. As well as being used on the tour passes, the image was enlarged enormously and used as the stage backdrop for the tour and for Morrissey's 'Madstock'
Finsbury Park gig of August 1992. Ridgers has photographed the British fetish club scene, from the early days of its inception as a little-known underground scene – for example, the start of the
Skin Two club in 1982, which was first held in Stallions nightclub in
Soho – up until the Skin Two Rubber Ball and quasi-mainstream acceptability. His work also appeared in
Skin Two magazine under the editorship of
Michelle Olley. She wrote of his book (
Stare) of this work: :Every midnight tribe is here – hippies, punks, ravers, goths, teds, mods and every pretty boy and dirty girl in between, shot in situ in their un-natural habitat. [. . . The book] manages to bring the glamour vixens and club kids together, creating a heady mix of reportage and eroticism. Uniquely, this is 'thrill of the moment' erotic realism, coming as it does directly from the subject, and not the photographer. He shoots it as he sees it, which makes this a rare and precious record of a certain kind of cheekiness, at a certain point in the evening, at a certain time in history. As well as his portrait-reportage work, Ridgers also began to amass commissions to photograph music and film stars of the era. Working predominantly for
NME, but also for national newspapers and other publications, he has photographed
Frank Zappa,
John Lee Hooker,
The Ramones,
Prince,
The Spice Girls,
J. G. Ballard,
Richard Harris and
Martin Amis.
Loaded Ridgers had already collaborated with the writer
James Brown at
NME. When Brown left to become the editor and co-founder – with
Tim Southwell and
Mick Bunnage – of
Loaded magazine, Ridgers was asked to contribute. which would run for fifteen years until 2010, one of the longest running features in the magazine's history. Many of these black-and-white fetish club scene photographs were later included in the book
Stare: Portraits from the Endless Night.
Loaded also gave Ridgers his own page, "The Derek Ridgers Interview", in which he told behind-the-scenes stories from his past photo shoots.
When We Were Young 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, were photographed while still unknown. Derek Ridgers's compulsion to photograph London clubs over two decades was an extraordinary one. He has produced thousands of remarkable photographs of remarkable people, transient beings moving across an urban landscape, experimenters, flamboyant souls who cared more than anything about how they looked and whose greatest fear was of being ordinary. But it was the ordinariness that Derek Ridgers glimpsed in these costumed characters that makes his photographs so powerful. Ridgers's photographs are an undeliberate chapter in a decade of English social and cultural history which changed the way we thought about music, fashion and consumption. It was the decade of the handmade and the customised, of Oxfam shopping, conspicuous sexuality, of excess, wide success and dismal failure. Played out against the backdrop of a rapidly changing London cityscape and a revolution in politics and economics, the style cultures that Derek Ridgers photographed meant far more than style. Of Ridgers' photographs of this period,
Val Williams writes: While Meadows' subjects revealed themselves as gauche, inhibited and curious, Ridgers's young men and women inhabited the camera's gaze as performers in a very particular arena. But it was the ordinariness that he glimpsed in these costumed characters that makes his photographs so powerful – the people he photographed wore beauty like a mask. The worlds that Ridgers photographed were small ones, peopled by young men and women who were captivated by the idea of image. His photographs do not search souls, they look at surfaces; these are not so much portraits as documents. . . . His subjects knew the rules of photography, knew not to smile or gesticulate – they were always still, needing to be recorded, longing for celebrity. Ridgers's photography captured the transitory nature of culture, a fleeting glimpse into what arrives, passes and is gone.
Gucci In 2017, Ridgers collaborated with the Italian fashion house,
Gucci, to shoot their
Alessandro Michele-designed men's and women's pre-autumn collection in Rome. This collaboration resulted in a photo-book, titled
Hortus Sanitatis (Latin for 'garden of health'), published by Gucci and launched at the
Comme des Garçons Trading Museum in Paris.
Collaborations with Danny Flynn In 2010, Ridgers collaborated with designer and printer
Danny Flynn in an exhibition at
Ketchum Pleon entitled
Every Bodies Enemies. The pieces combined Ridgers' portraits of musicians, film makers and actors, such as
Keith Richards,
Kylie Minogue,
Nick Cave,
Dennis Hopper,
John Lee Hooker,
David Lynch,
Elvis Costello and
Skin with Flynn's unusual screenprinting technique of printing using everyday powders such as sugar, salt, custard and raspberry powder. Examples of the work produced for the
Every Bodies Enemies gallery show, London: File:Danny - Keith (smaller).JPG File:Danny - Lynch.JPG File:Danny - Enemies - Nick 3.JPG File:Every Bodies Enemies 2.JPG In 2022, Ridgers' images of Nick Cave from four photo-sessions were collated by Flynn into a book called
Grace, published by Burning Book Press. ==Publications==