Skins A Way of Life: Skinheads (Two Finger Salute)

Yup I read it and it’s great

The book consists mostly of photos, mostly from England in the early 1980s with a couple from the early 1970s, all black & white, from three main sources - Shutterstock, Photoshot and Mirrorpix. The first has stock photos for sale and for free, the second does photo manipulation (some of the photos in the book are composites), the last is an archive of photos published in various newspapers. Every second or third page has 1-4 short paragraphs of political commentary that is not connected to the photos specifically nor to reality generally. The publisher describes their works as "...art and photography books littered with vitriolic and highly subjective commentary...", and that is accurate enough, unlike much of what is written in this book. The narrative pushed by Leftists in the 20th century was that racialist (i.e., Nazi) skinheads didn't exist originally and arose later in the USA and were imported to the UK via movies. The internet has made that too easy to disprove. A successful replacement has yet to emerge. The rather vague history and timeline suggested by the text is contradicted by the photos in the book (and all those not in the book). Apart from some photos being composites others are, intentionally or accidentally, misleading. For example, the photo spanning pages 126-127 is from a newspaper that says it is an "outdoor concert in aid of racial harmony". This concert is not mentioned in the book but they want you to think skinheads were like this. The only skinheads there were the ones outside the concert protesting it and the newspaper reported that they were arrested. The author also advances the notion that football hooligans were skinheads. The only picture of these hooligans, pages 158-159, like the concert there are no skinheads in the pic. The author acknowledges the lack of evidence but claims, get this, the lack of evidence is because it was so commonplace that it did not even need to be mentioned! Now that is gold! Well, more like iron pyrite.

I really wanted to love this book, even now, I'm picking it up again and leafing through it, but I keep coming back to-No, I just can't. There are two sides to the skinhead coin, the heads and the tails. With the heads, you get your lovable skins, both black and white, men and women, drinking beers, hanging out, and listening to ska & reggae together. They don't always have shaved heads or boots, but there's a high fashion sense to them, a style that tied it all together. And then there's the tails, where there are more menacing skins-mainly white by this point. They listen to street punk and oi, they're in gangs, they may or may not be racist. The style and fashion element of the sub-culture has faded into a uniform and a ton of godawful tattoos. I just get depressed when I see this side of this subculture that I love so much, I just see the ugly thing that it's been reduced to. Now this book isn't per se a book on neo-nazi skins, but with so many pictures of skins being hauled off my the cops, hideous facial tattoos, and very little black skinhead representation-It just doesn't bring to mind anything positive or joyful about being a skinhead.

another book that is good only for the cover, better skinhead books out there