Dressed Up For Town
'I got a few good photographs, then I got a lot of good photographs. And I remember looking at them and some of the photographs just told you all about certain scenes that maybe three or four pages of text wouldn't.
People have been obliging. Kind. I don't think I've had too much difficulty getting material. One ex-photographer had stuff in a filing cabinet and said 'It could be lying there for another 35 years and no one would see it. If you want to put it in the book I'd be happy for it to be seen' I thought that was a good attitude.
Grannys can be good as well. Back in the day grandmothers, or even the mam and dad, if there was a camera in the house and if any of the girls or the guys dressed a certain way it was like 'You're not going out like that! I'm photographing you.' and they'd hang onto them in the old family albums.
The original year or two, it was hard to find material from that. Now I do have some good stuff from say ''79 onwards - the No Romance. When punk became very uniform you could buy your outfit in the shop, spike your hair, have a mohawk. The first two years was very much about dressing up in a different way, very DIY. Some of the early photographs we have are great. The lads that would be coming out of that rock/hippy scene in the mid 70s who were embracing punk. You know, these guys were still wearing flares and Cuban heels but they'd have a few badges and a few pins and maybe a tie or crucifix in their ear or a homemade sex pistols t-shirt which would kind of make them punk but visually it's great because they're kind of half and half. It's before its goes very stringent. That original first two years I find really interesting but its hard to find good photographs of that.
I tried to track down the old street photographers. Some of them worked for camera shops - some of them did freelance - they worked in the shop developing the stuff. What happened to all that when the shops shut? The two big ones - Cameo, which was also known as Bobby's because it was run by two brothers Con and Bobby. Con would take the photographs on the street and Bobby would do the work in the shop so everyone called it Bobby’s. And Max's, that was two other brothers Max and Caufield ,I think it is, or Crawford. Then there was other guys in the 40's. The Field team they came over from Russia after the war and took photos for years. All those street photographs. They're great. They capture the whole- head to toe. And everybody in the city had at least one or two in their families. Back then that was the only way for a lot of people to get a photograph collection together of yourself or your family dressed up in town, at the ballroom or dinner dance or cafe or disco wearing your finest clothes. Eventually I found a couple. A lot of them are dead now. I found their daughters had a good chat with them. They gave me some material. But they never brought a lot of the stuff from the shop home all of it got thrown out.
The eighties have a whole change of cameras that were accessible to people. The quality varies enormously! All the way up through out that decade. So you have like the Polaroids, then the Instmatics, then you had the other little narrow things, all sorts. So if you're into photography, you know, you 're studying different photographs from back in the day and how they came out. How they were developed and printed. Even you can see in some of the photographs that it's that particular either brand of film or camera in most cases. Which is interesting I suppose to photography students.
The photo booth ones are always interesting. Each section of the book 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s... We have a photo booth section in each one. They have a genuine feel that you don't get off the street photographers. They are invaluable as well.
Nostalgia was another reason to do the book. I miss those days of all those scene-y people dressing like that. Looking at those bunch (points at photo of mod couple). That would have been colourful, standing out. It doesn't have the same impact.
You're told about certain photographs there's one wonderful story of Johnny Eagle, who owns that tattoo shop on Eden quay there, his dad ran the famous one on Caple stereet for 50, 60 years or more. There's that story of him taking the old Irish FCA green uniform and he dyed it navy and went in and bought all these old buttons and badges from Dandelion from the army shop. Old German SS and military badges and basically turned the old FCA uniform into an SS German uniform. He'd a bus conductors hat and he did something with that aswell and he had a big pair of the kinda Seargent Pepper boots so he looked like this SS officer. There's a wonderful picture of him and a few punk girls, one girl on either side of him, taken on O'Connell st. There's two copies of it and both of the copies are taken. I'd love to have them. It's that very early scene where you dressed up a certain way and there was still a shock value in that. The girls used to wear bin-liners and carry kettles - old copper, metal kettles as handbags. But that only lasted a year and a half before that element of dressing kind of disappeared altogether. I'd love to find more from that era.
Today's youths, some of them mix up half-styles together and in doing so it creates a cool kind of look instead of sticking to, for example, a stringent punk look which you've kind of seen before, which we've said doesn't have the same impact on the city. Nowadays it blends all together, It's less colourful. Back in the day Dublin was so grey and drab that any characters that dressed differently stood out.
The lesser known smaller groups were as interesting and part of the make up of the city as much as the punks and skinheads were. The break-dancers, the BMX kids, the skateboard kids, the kids on their horses and ponies- the urban cowboys- even things that weren't a scene, say, in the mid seventies when the Bay City Rollers were huge and they had a huge female following and the girls used to dress up in tartan and all that that was a small scene that was there for a while. Then people that weren't into scenes that dressed casually or non-style. I suppose you could say that was important as well to show how they dressed and what they were into. I wanted it to be an overall view of the young people in the city and not just the subcultures.
(On Urban Cowboys) That was specific to certainly Ireland, maybe Dublin. It was certainly the only one that didn't have a music connection or come from a music background. It was kids on their horses. Even the kids with the skateboards and BMXs, a lot of those kids were into hip hop. It was interesting in that respect to find something that was there that other kids were doing that wasn't in a similar vein to the musically influenced tribes of the city but I think more or less that is the only one like that. (pointing to picture of young boys on a cart with sacks around them ) A picture like that to me was imperative. It had to go in the book. The young kids. They used to do that all the time, go around the inner city delivering coal on the horses and carts. Those kids they probably went on to do the urban cowboy thing. I thought that was an important feature of the inner city as much as punks and teds going around Stephens Green.
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