I’ve never been able to establish just how the Greetings From London postcard, with it’s customary picture of two mohicaned and sneering punks giving the two fingered salute, came about. I suspect that it evolved from the pictures tourists were taking of punks on the Kings Road in London and that this odd new phenomena was then taken advantage of by an enterprising entrepreneur with an interest in postcards.
Over the years, the images have changed, and the participants have - at times - leaned more towards goth than punk in image, but these postcards can still be found and purchased around the tourist shops in West London, 50 years after punks first flame.
Part of me wonders if they operate, at a British level at least, as a kind of follow on from the saucy seaside postcard of yore, and if they have become a kind of cheeky British institution. But part of me also wonders what on earth the average tourist is getting out of it when they purchase them. Is it that punk itself in the nations capital has become a key part of the tourist experience?
I find them weirdly charming on a level I can’t quite fathom, and would miss them if they suddenly stopped existing.
The kind of images you see used for the postcards are posed and contrived but because they use ‘real’ punks and are taken on the streets, they have something in common with the work of the social documentary photographer Shirley Baker, who began her career producing unposed naturalistic photography around working class Salford and Manchester in the 1960s, but who did - for a period in the 1980s - also take naturalistic photos of punks in Stockport (1981) and Camden (1986 through to 1991). What I like about Baker’s photos of the punks in Stockport is the way that her work echoes her earlier work from the 1950s and 1960s, where she also photographed young people in a naturalistic way at dances.
Other naturalistic portraits of punk from the late 1970s and early 1980s would include the artist Jo Brocklehurst's drawings of her punk neighbours and Anita Corbin's photographic project Visual Girls, which depicted girls involved with a number of subcultures in the early to mid 1980s, including punk.
Brocklehurst's portraits serve different functions to Baker’s social realism but, like Baker, Brocklehurst had no agenda - she just liked to draw interesting subjects and was well served in this regard by the punk squats in her neighbourhood of West Hampstead in the 1980s.
Corbin’s two exhibitions had a more specific remit in that they were specifically about women and subculture, across multiple early 80s subcultures, including punk. This was a way to visually show the presence of women in subcultures, something often denied them.
Photo by Taylor Keeran on Unsplash
