School was a nightmare for me. I liked the art, but I could not convey what I had in mind on the page, which caused me great frustration. But in 1979, at the age of 14, I went to Woolies to buy a pair of binoculars and instead got a camera – a little 110 Hanimex. The development of my first set of prints was a moment that changed my life. I remember the voice in my head: “I will become a photographer”. That’s it. I never wavered. I would get my friends to make a Boots camera movie for me because I was so scared. The only downside was that wherever I went, I would get, “Oh, look who he is, David Bailey.” A year after I got the camera, I started photographing skinheads. There are no strangers in my photos: they are my classmates, my friends, my mom and dad and my younger brother Neville, who was also skinny and extremely stylish, slender and refined. I managed to make stars the people I loved – normal people. This is a photo of my partner Skinny Jim on the subway in 1980. There were six of us, all 15 years old. We had taken the train to London on a rainy day to go to Carnaby Street and get a Harrington jacket – or whatever we could afford. It was a day away and I had taken my camera as I usually did. The picture is perfect. He’s up there with whatever one of the big boys has done Skinny Jim was one of those 15-year-olds who thought they were the toughest because they hadn’t been punched in the nose yet. That expression is Skinny Jim everywhere. My God, what a face. London was scary then. We had to keep our heads down. There were gangs roaming around. You could not go anywhere without being kicked in the head. But I was never intimidated. I was six feet tall and I remember using my Hanimex as a weapon when a man tried to have fun with me in Trafalgar Square. He took it over his head. The picture is perfect. I’m not blowing my own trumpet, but I’m staring at it and it ‘s up there with whatever one of the big boys has done. I’ve seen so many variations of my skinhead photos over the last 30 years, but they are all so ingenious and they all use models. I was in a tiny gang on a small townhouse, in a tiny little town that no one had ever heard of at the time, taking pictures that I thought no one would ever see just because I liked doing it. So there is honesty in that, and that’s the power. There is no attached narrative. What bothers me is that I was only 15 years old when I took this picture on a moving train. It is the level of self-confidence. Something very strange was happening, that I became such a confident photographer when I was so insecure at the same time. If you talk to most people about skinheads, they think they are right-wingers and Nazis. The demonization was continuous. But the skinhead movement, when it started, came out of the philosophy of black and white children joining and dancing to 60s Jamaican ska music. That’s where my photos come in. Because when I do exhibitions, people usually come with tight lips, waiting to see fat, bald 30-year-olds with bulldogs. But if you’re at a concert dancing to ska music – this is skinhead. So simple. I do not know what happened to Skinny Jim. Nobody knows. I heard that he left and invented things. I heard that someone dropped him the other day on Facebook and they said that he was a wonderful man, who was involved in charities. Someone else said he was dead. So I do not know. I would never have remembered him at all if I had not taken this photo. Gavin Watson
The biography of Gavin Watson
Born: Kingsbury, London, 1965 Education: “Absolutely jealous. I did not need it. ” and that’s boring. “ Gavin Watson’s photobooks, Time Has Creative Power and Oh! What Fun We Had, are now available through the Museum of Youth Culture.
