Derek Ridgers has been capturing the most photogenic denizens of London alternative culture on film since 1976 and the birth of Punk.

And it is no exaggeration to say that his images of punks, teddy boys, new romantics and fetish folk from the last four decades probably constitute the most illuminating and extensive documenting of the capital’s youth subcultures attempted by any one photographer.

Derek began this labour of love a year after I joined the London music paper Sounds as a staff journalist. And since Sounds, like NME, was an early champion of Punk, our paths began to cross fairly regularly at clubs and gigs.

We continued to find ourselves covering many of the same events as Punk gave way to New Wave and then, perhaps more significantly from a visual glamour point of view, to the New Romantic scene.

By then I was already an ‘out perv’ on the music scene, and although I didn’t know too much about Derek’s personal interests at that point, I was not that surprised to find him turning up at the opening night of the original Skin Two Club at Stallions in Soho on January 31 1983.

Debbie, Torture Garden 2010 (Derek Ridgers)

It was soon clear that the new fetish scene, which many consider the offspring of Punk and New Romanticism, was right up Derek’s strasse, professionally at least.

And so, as I gradually moved my allegiance across more or less fulltime from the music scene to this exciting new subculture with its own clubs, designers and magazines like Skin Two, Derek would be at the same events, photographing the same stuff that I was writing about.

Because (as he says in his introduction to The Dark Carnival) he wanted to photograph “the peacocks and the show-offs and the kind of people that I could never have been myself”, Derek Ridgers focused on the venues and events where such individuals were most likely to be encountered.

He shot at many different fetish nights, but I think I most frequently encountered him at Torture Garden, whose parties have always encouraged exhibitionism of the most creative kind.

At some point in the night, I would generally find myself walking through one of the venue’s spaces and notice this tall, bearded figure propping himself up against a wall, camera at half-cock, waiting for some suitably decorative girl, boy or trans-person to pass within range.

We’d usually find time for a chat, which I would enjoy because, like me, he was a professional observer (even if only one of us was actually a photographer).

Always polite and never pushy, he was able to effortlessly put his subjects at ease, and this shows in his work.

When I took up event photography myself in my last few years at Skin Two before leaving to launch The Fetishistas, I found myself often copying Ridgers’ wall-based waiting approach.

Why not? When your targets are the kind of exhibitionists that frequent fetish clubs, you don’t have to find them — they will find you if you’ve got a camera and a photopass.