Derek Ridgers’ new book shows snogging couples at London nightclubs from the 1970s to 1990s

From canoodling at Hammersmith station to full-frontal snogging at Camden Palace (now Koko), Derek Ridgers’ new photobook Hello, I Love You, published by Idea books, shows public displays of affection from the 1970s to the 90s. Derek’s body of work has traced the lines of youth culture through music and fashion, from portraiture of punks at the subculture’s heights and the hedonism of Ibiza nightlife.

While kissing couples doesn’t even make up “one tenth of one percent of the photographs I took during those years”, says Derek, the new book picks out and zooms in on small moments of intimacy. In these dark corners of London’s club scene is where these couples found solace, and Derek, in his own words, caught “what it feels like to be young, being with someone and momentarily forgetting your worries and cares”.

These glimpses into people’s personal lives and loves push you to conjure a story as you view. “I’d never met the couples I photographed beforehand and I usually never saw them again afterwards,” says Derek. He exercised a distance to his photographs, as he wasn’t part of the community he was capturing. “In my cardigan and open neck shirt, I usually stood out like a sore thumb,” Derek says.

His fly on the wall approach makes for a completely untouched composition – his shots are unbothered by outside elements. Wherever he could, Derek would ask permission sometimes before or sometimes after. Many of these couples are gorging on each other, unaware and in bliss, far removed from the world around them. The situations were not sought out, and so portray the magic of organic encounters both in front and behind the camera. “Often with these very quick stolen moments, one hardly has time to properly compose,” says Derek.

Many of the photographs were taken in dark places, something Derek always considered when it came to printing. Derek used a Nikon FM2 and, more recently, a Nikon D810 and the photographer used a flash at all times. Derek used to carry around a weak flash gun mounted upside down atop the lens, using a makeshift bracket out of a wire coat hanger “intended to cut down on intrusive shadows”, says Derek, the D810’s built in, pop-up flash, however, proved a lot less trouble.

One of Derek’s stand-out images from the book is a photo of a couple in a rain storm at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert – a two day festival hosted in Washington D.C raising awareness for Tibetan independence and human rights abuses. “The couple are completely oblivious to the rain, me, and the chance of getting struck by lightening,” shares Derek; several people did get struck that day, making the photographed moment feel that much more urgent. For Derek, these kissing moments represent only a small corner of his life’s work but, in Hello, I Love You, they seem so much bigger.