Skins: Gavin Watson

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Al Pacino's girlfriend Noor Alfallah, 29, says she's 'not the marrying type' after welcoming son Roman with actor, 83 What’s crazy to me is I took so many pictures,” Watson says on the phone from his London studio. “I couldn’t afford to do it. No one ever paid me to do it. No one ever saw the pictures. I just took them for no real reason, except that I enjoyed taking them.”

EJ: Skins has become a cultural artefact in its own right, at the time did you ever feel as if you were in the midst of capturing history? At the age of 14, Watson began photographing his brother, Neville, and his group of friends, who all grew up at the forefront of their local skinhead scene in High Wycombe. Watson’s work had no specific intention or motive behind it –“I’ve got tens of thousands of pictures that I took for no reason whatsoever”– other than simply tracing a period of pure friendship, era-defining style and real life. DAISY GOODWIN: Why I believe a good funeral can be just as memorable and life-affirming as a wedding (and to deny your family one is selfish), as more than half of us say a formal send-off is a waste of money Great British Bake Off confirm fan favourite has left the Channel 4 show ahead of the final as viewers call for them to be made a 'fifth host'Gavin Watson: The answer to that is I didn't. I was 15 years old and photographing my mates and my brother, it was the subject that surrounded me and just so happened to be on my door step. Skins and Punks was not a subject that I intentionally set out to photograph, it was my life. The images I created were down to me being a fast worker, I kept things very simple using the one camera and film, this is very much the way I still work today.

Laurence Fox denies 'brutal' divorce from Billie Piper turned him into a 'weaponised anti-woke bad boy' as he claims tweets branding him 'racist' were an 'organised pile-on' to destroy his career Until a few years ago Gavin's images had been held within underground cult status, with his work being brought into the media by Shane Meadows after images from ‘Skins’ Gavin's first book were used as the inspiration and muse for the award winning film This is England. Gavin Watson documented his friends as they came of age at the heart of a misunderstood community.”— i-D Nothing has changed. It’s got a lot more solidified. I used to feel isolated about how much bullshit was out there that we saw through at an early age. We had to rebel. I’m glad the next generation woke up and started to piss off these people in power – it’s beautiful!”Author Mr Watson, who was born in 1065, said that the skinhead subculture came from mods and young people in the 60s mixing with West Indians and 'digging the music', according to Dazed.

Golddigger, 15, pretended to fall in love with man, 35, she met online before stabbing him in the head when he didn't buy her the gifts she wanted In England, there were two waves of the skinhead cult. From its inception, the skinhead subculture was largely based around music. The first group appeared in the late 1960s as an offshoot of the mod subculture and largely died out by 1972. For Watson, the presence of skins in such communities defies the skewed perception of the subculture as a breeding ground for white nationalism. “It goes against the narrative so hard,” he explains. “It just goes to show that [being a] skinhead’s not about race, it’s about a working-classness, a comradery, and that is universal. That’s why, whenever there’s a strong working-class culture – regardless of religion – you’ll find people listening to ska music and you’ll find people dressed as skinheads.” Forde, Fiona (19 May 2007). "The struggle continues for Watson sons". iol.co.za . Retrieved 2 April 2017.Director Shane Meadows has cited Watson's photographs as an inspiration for his cult hit 2006 film, This is England, which tells the story of young skinheads in 1983. While there is little doubt that North Americans, especially Canadians as part of the British Commonwealth, were exposed to skinhead subculture in the late 1960s and during the initial resurgence of this movement in 1978, it did not take hold as a youth cult in the United States until the arrival of punk. Lindeque, Mia, Kalenga, Aurelie. Agrizzi 'saddened' by Watson's death, Eyewitness News, 26 August 2019. Retrieved on 26 August 2019. Gavin Watson grew up in a typical working class overspill town that surround London. Stumbling into photography aged 14, becoming a skinhead at 15, he inadvertently documented the real social interracial music scene behind the media’s right-wing portrayal of a demonised youth culture. Undiscovered until the 1990s, his work became a blueprint for the work of filmmaker Shane Meadows, and significantly influences a generation of photographers working today.

By the time Gavin Watson had left school at the age of 16, he had already amassed more than 10,000 photographs of his friends, taken at a council estate in High Wycombe, during the time the second generation of British skinheads were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 80s. I didn’t want to be a rebel; I wanted to be normal. I was a shy, sensitive child that wanted to be an artist, but I just felt I didn’t have much of a choice in the environment I was growing up in, which was extremely violent. I didn’t want the pictures to show that. I never photographed any fighting or the grief that poverty brings. I didn’t want to photograph the abuse and the violence. It was part of my everyday life. Why would you expose your friends’ darkest secrets? The skinhead subculture was born in England in the late 1960s as an offshoot of the mod culture. Skinheads were distinct from other British subcultures due to their uniform of boots, jeans, braces (suspenders), and the trademark shaved head. The growth of the right-wing National Front and its recruitment of youth merely increased the amount of conflict present in the skinhead subculture. Punk shows and Ska shows were marred by skinhead violence. Even American newspapers covered the race riots that exploded in London in 1981.Intimate, vibrant and full of character, his new book is a testament to the inclusiveness and diversity that skinhead culture was actually born of, demystifying the stereotypes that skins have struggled to shake off since. Though it wasn’t specifically his intention, the book naturally helps to counter the Neo-Nazi rhetoric it has come to be associated with, and he insists vehemently that real skinhead culture – the kind he experienced growing up – is a world away from the depiction fuelled by mainstream media. Toyota Corolla in which Gavin Watson died was not his ‘normal car’. The Citizen, 26 August 2019. Retrieved on 26 August 2019. Northern soul was a music and dance movement that grew out of the British mod scene in northern England in the late 1960s, largely inspired by the faster tempo and darker sounds of mid-60s American soul music. Records emerging from the Northern Soul scene became known as ‘stompers’ for their soulful vocals and heavy beats. Gavin Watson: I don't actually think I have a particular style, well I haven't consciously set out to have one anyway, although I do know other people think I do, they can look at my work and know it's a Gavin Watson. For me its more about looking through the lens and if it looks good I take it, I'm generally just happy when they are in focus (laughs), but to be honest, sometimes it's OK with me if they are a not, they don't always have to be perfect, maybe that's part of my style. As I said I like to keep things very simple, I work with one camera at a time and still use film. I don't like using a zoom lens, I prefer to move around a lot instead, this is the way i worked when i was 15 and i still do now. I do think my pictures have a certain energy within them, they actually look like real people rather that just figures.