The Boots, the Braces, the Record Collection

Gavin Watson was actually there—a skinhead himself in the early 1980s in High Wycombe—which is what separates the photographs in Skins from the usual documentation of subcultures by outsiders who’ve read about them first. The images are intimate in the way only insider access makes possible: teenagers in boots and braces, multiracial groups gathered around records, the texture of a working-class British youth culture that had more to do with ska and reggae than the far-right politics the scene later became associated with. Watson photographed what it actually looked like before the mythology hardened around it.