Skinhead: An Archive // Exhibition
“Skinhead culture began as an authentic response to working class conditions in late 1960s Britain. Impoverished young people living in cities listening to ska & reggae music developed a harder mod style, which reflected the bleakness they saw in their everyday surroundings. Later at the end of the 1970s a new and different skinhead subculture emerged, integrated with the punk movement and Oi!.”
Excerpt from foreword to ‘Skinhead: An Archive’ by Toby Mott
Skinhead: An Archive reflects the powerful aesthetic sensibility of the movement, featuring thoughtful use of risograph and offset-litho printing to reproduce the rough immediacy of the original material contrasted with luxurious binding and finishing to create a paradoxical and intriguing artefact. The book features an exclusive font design, developed and adapted from a skinhead article in a 1980s issue of Penthouse, which will be available to download in the Ditto store. Alongside a wealth of unseen visual material, the book will contain texts from writers with unique experience of the culture, including Bruce LaBruce and Garry Bushell.
Designed by Jamie Andrew Reid and published by Ditto, with printed material curated by Toby Mott, the book examines this multi-faceted culture through the filter of printed material, zines, posters and films. The book is divided into sub-sections looking at the original iteration of skinhead, the fascist interpretation, the socialist counterpoint, queer skinhead culture, exploitation literature, skin girls, and everything in between.
