After a visit to Southend’s Focal Point Gallery for the travelling show After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024, I wondered whether John Ingledew’s study of early 1980s London skinheads would’ve have met the curator Johny Pitt’s criteria for inclusion despite being made at the beginning of the 1980s while the Soviet empire still appeared to have a future?

Pitt’s photographers all self-identify as working-class, which might be another reason for his exclusion, but even if John Ingledew does call himself ‘working-class’ he wasn’t a part of the culture he was documenting – he was at the time an undergraduate on a graphic design course at St. Martins.

His inspiration was Bruce Davidson’s Brooklyn Gang (1959) whose photographs too might fit After the End of History’s further criteria to explore ‘the challenges and beauty of contemporary working class life’ though his work comes three decades too early and from the wrong side of the Atlantic. John Ingledew’s subjects are indisputably working-class but his images are of a journey that takes them faraway from any notion of pride in either their class identity or their subcultural affiliation. To my eye their life-choices (if that’s what they are) and whatever life-energy they have is entirely entropic – a spiralling down into a void. There’s no transcendence, no sense of a passage in time that will be outgrown like in Chris Killip’s The Station shot in 1985, a study of kids at a Gateshead punk club, or even with those youths Ingledew photographed for his classic study of Chelsea fans, A View from the Bridge (1998).

I can see the link to Davidson, Killip and others who have documented youth subcultures, and even to some of the work featured in the Southend show, but Ingledew’s subject’s connections with one another appear to be a sharing of nihilistic traits more than, say, any communal enthusiasm for Prince Buster, Discharge, Kerry Dixon or whomever or whatever. In their embrace of nothing these skins have more a kinship with Larry Clark’s death tripping speed freaks in Tulsa (1971).

The cropped hair, boots and braces all signify subcultural bona fides but these are youths lacking in the more refined style espoused by Two Tone and late 60s originals. Their gear is as shabby as their tattoos, which even today, in an age where facial decoration is fairly common-place, still shock – these are disfigurements, acts of self-harm, and not by any measure of taste, either good or bad, an enhancement.

And yet there is respect in these photographs, which is what I think John Ingledew brings to the situations he documents and gives to those he photographs. Unlike Larry Clark he may not have been part of the pack he was photographing but there’s also nothing voyeuristic or exploitative in his images; like Bruce Davidson and Chris Killip he had earned his subject’s trust. Looking For Trouble has my respect – Ingledew’s eye is true.