Vintage 80s London Street Photography

by Stiletto, Johnny

• ISBN13: 9780711232518
• ISBN10: 0711232512
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-08-30
• Publisher: Frances Lincoln

Summary

'No other city has the variety of hairstyles male and female that parade the streets of London. The bouffant, the duck arse, the white wings of power swept over the ears, the coxcomb punk, the flat top, the social outrider's bowl cut. They're all there to make a place. In respect of the hair of the 80s, the rest of the world was dead from the neck up.' Buy a 35mm camera at the beginning of 1980 and spend the next 10 years walking around London taking half a roll of black and white a day and photograph whatever happens in front of you. You get Mick Jagger, New Romantics, ra-ra skirts, Boy George, Sloane Rangers. The beginning of Covent Garden, yuppies, the IRA bombings, the Iranian Embassy siege. Hundreds of headlines - John Lennon Shot Dead, Royal Romance: Andrew To Wed. Margaret Thatcher's London, fashions that came and went. Here are 160 unique street photographs of London when it was the style, musical, political and fashion capital of the world.

Author Biography

Johnny Stiletto. Well known for his intimate, socially revealing black and white street shots. A collection of his photographs is in the Tate Gallery, London. His TV work includes documentaries and commercials. Stiletto's photograph of Francis Bacon on the London Underground was reputedly Bacon's favourite photograph of himself.

Excerpts

There is a thing called London style, outsiders sometimes call it fashion but Londoners use it for something else, more often than not as the fine point of a social rapier and a thoroughly legitimate means of self promotion in a city at a time when overt showing off was despised. The much repaired Oxford shoes of the QCs, the dandruff velvet collar on the coat of the wine merchant. The clanking Gucci spurs of the City's serious money boys, the tracksuits of the chronically unfit. This is a version of the English language that Londoners save for one another, a language of signs and symbols written in fabric and flesh and general distaste, a language designed to repel, kill, put down, fleece, con, intimidate and attract.

No other city has the variety of hairstyles male and female that parade the streets of London. The bouffant, the duck arse, the white wings of power swept over the ears, the coxcomb punk, the flat top, the social outrider's bowl cut. They're all there to make a place. In respect of the hair of the 80s, the rest of the world was dead from the neck up.