Inside this summer’s must-see exhibition of the evolution of Dublin’s youth culture

There is a huge amount of scope for the National Museum to broaden the material that’s here to create a wider exhibition – perhaps one with the addition of audio from the interviews that Garry has conducted or with the clothing worn – it has the potential to draw in lovers of fashion and social history alike.

The origins of Garry’s archive are rooted in a project documenting street style and subcultures in his book, a collaboration with Niall McCormack, entitled Where Were You? Dublin Youth Culture & Street Style 1950 – 2000 (Hi Tone Books, 2011). His archive includes photos from professional photographers but also from acquaintances and friends who have plundered old albums and shoe boxes to fish out photos of themselves when they were young punks, rockers or ravers.

Garry has even been known to approach complete strangers if their style in their fifties, sixties or seventies hints at an exciting or interesting former sartorial life. “I’ll see people in the supermarket and look at them and think: ‘He had to have been cool when he was young’ or ‘She had to be wearing something great’… I’ll approach them and say: ‘Excuse me, you didn’t dress the way you are now in 1968 did you?’ It’s an obsession.”

There are photos taken on O’Connell Bridge in Dublin by professional photographers in the 1960s, reminiscent of those you may have of your mum or granny in a miniskirt and beehive. However, many of the images are personal snapshots of mods on Dublin streets, goths in gardens and box-bedroom ravers in the suburbs.

While many of the images in the exhibition feature music-influenced styles, a small proportion of Garry’s archive features kids riding horses, breakdancers and skateboarders; the activity, as much as the music, serving as a backdrop to their sense of taste and style. But music is really at the heart of it all, as is the zero-f*cks-given sense of young rebellion which still oozes out of many of these photos many years after they were taken.

The name A New Form of Beauty comes courtesy of Dublin punk group The Virgin Prunes. Touring again since the release of his latest album, Ecce Homo, founding member and Renaissance man Gavin Friday writes: “When I look at this collection of photographs, my overall feeling is one of joy. Certainly, we all suffer from a touch of ‘back in the day’ romanticism or nostalgia, but you just can’t deny what these images reveal. They evidence the innocence, the innovation and the defiance of working class youth at a time when Ireland was a suffocating place still under the stranglehold of emigration, unemployment and the theocracy of the Catholic church.”

“When oppression occurs, there is always resistance. Resistance is often best seen in the creative spaces that youth create,” he continues. “The young Dubliners in this exhibition turned their ordinary into extraordinary – identifying with various subcultures including Mods, Skinheads, Teddy Boys, Bootboys, Punks, Hippies, Goths and New Romantics. There is no debate in my mind that music was the common glue, the instigator for all these young Dubliners to hold their own, to be their own, showing the North and Southside of Dublin that they existed, and that they had something to say.”

Garry is constantly on the lookout for photos to add to the archive. “I go looking for material on social media, or someone might point me in the right direction, people will give me photos, or professional photographers might give me prints or contact sheets. Since the original book, I haven’t stopped collecting,” he says. “As a music fan, you’d have records and keep a scrapbook and at some stage the posters would come down off the wall or go up to the attic, but for some reason I kept a lot of stuff. I think I was as interested in why people follow bands and dress a certain way as I was in the actual music itself.”

He is currently working on a number of projects, including a book featuring the 1980s photography he has collected. “I started with the 80s because I was a teenager then but I also believe it was a great period for youth culture and subculture activity,” he says. “There is a constant need for me to acquire stuff – it’s almost like an addiction trying to find that one missing photo. I’m like a magpie in one sense – I possess a great archive of other people’s work. I don’t say I own the archive – I have the use of these photos for particular projects.”

While there might have been warring sartorial and musical factions on the city streets, Garry says that there was also inter-tribe or inter-group competition when it came to the clothes. “I have a better mohawk than you or I have the best parka jacket or I have the latest Stüssy top that costs a hundred quid in London…” he says. “Some people were into the clothes in a big way and were obsessed with the details, whereas others were happy to have a 50 percent look and still be in the group. There are the people who wanted the authentic look – the three-button mohair suit rather than a suit from Burton. There were people who wanted to look top dollar, there were people who were into the music and their mates but didn’t necessarily dress the full look and then there were people who hopped from scene to scene.”

Whatever they were into, some of those pictured are now in their fifties and sixties and still possess a punk attitude. “But there’s something about capturing them when they’re younger – that’s where the best pictures are,” says Garry. “Usually with subcultures it tends to be kids of 15 or 16 upwards but one of my favourite pictures in the exhibition is of three kids smoking – one of the boys in the picture is a solicitor now, I think, but he’s still into his punk rock and still in a band. Ten-year-old him was cooler and more punk than most people who blew their own trumpets about their style at the time.”