The British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins died, in September, at the age of seventy-eight, after a groundbreaking and globe-spanning career, leaving behind a catalogue that ranges from images of war-torn Afghanistan during the mid- to late nineties to scenes from Japan in the early two-thousands. But Steele-Perkins, a member of the Magnum photo agency, was particularly attuned to discovering the alien, and the alienated, at home, in the United Kingdom. There, he was at once an insider—he attended Christ’s Hospital, among the country’s most prestigious boarding schools—and an outsider, having been born in what was then still colonial Burma to a British military father and a local Burmese mother. It made sense, then, that Steele-Perkins was drawn to the depiction of subcultures and the marginalized, or what he once described as “small worlds which have the whole world in them.” Among those he immortalized were the so-called Teds, the U.K.’s first recognizable tribe dedicated to teen-age rebellion, who became the subject of his first photo book, made in collaboration with the writer Richard Smith and published in 1979.

Barry Ransome in a pub called the Castle, on Old Kent Road, London, 1976.

Teddy Boys, as they were otherwise known, had emerged in Britain in the nineteen-fifties. They were working-class youths who scandalized mainstream society with their elaborate neo-Edwardian frock coats and drainpipe trousers, their outlandishly styled hair—a quiff up front, and a D.A., or duck’s arse, at the nape of the neck—and their skirmishes and ruckuses in dance halls and night clubs. By the late seventies, other youth subcultures had followed in their wake: the mods and rockers, the hippies, the punks. The Ted revival that Steele-Perkins captured in that period combined generational rebelliousness with a kind of doubled nostalgia: for both the teens and for the fifties, an era in which men still wore suits and women still wore dresses, and going out on a Friday night was an occasion for peacocking and parade. “A night out with the Teds was generally a good crack—sometimes some violence, some vomit on the carpet, but generally a rock’n’roll party,” Steele-Perkins wrote as he looked back at his time in their midst for an article that appeared in the Observer Magazine in 2003.

The Teds shared a fascination with the iconography of American youth culture—among their carefully curated outfits are leather jackets and shades that would not have shamed James Dean—but the context in which Steele-Perkins captures his subjects is recognizably English. There is the dinginess of the damask wallpaper in a pub where one Ted stands on the backrest of a leather-covered banquette; a member of his confraternity sits below, leaning into the intimate ambit of a girl who wears a fur coat. He looks into her eyes but is patently more interested in her mouth, and possibly other orifices; in another shot, he paws at her coat lapel with nail-bitten, dirt-encrusted hands that belie the showy glamour of his drape, or jacket. In one photograph of a dance floor in full swing, the wallpaper in the background is printed with a leafy, floral pattern by William Morris, the textile artist who sought to elevate the decorative arts in Britain in the late nineteenth century. The floor, meanwhile, is covered with parquet-wood tiles familiar to anyone who was required to sit cross-legged in an assembly hall in Britain in the seventies. You can almost smell the varnish. The gymnastic movements of one young dancer, who is bent over at the waist, legs splayed apart and arse radically elevated, is a reminder that he has only recently graduated from the child’s playground to the dance floor, which is itself a playground for avid, horny adolescents.

Most of the Teds depicted are young—discovering the look, and discovering themselves, in the full flush of masculine cockiness. Steele-Perkins is especially strong when he captures a group shot in which the effort to pose for the camera is about to dissolve into something more unruly. One image, for instance, looks like a still from a Tarantino take on a buddy movie, with five young men clutching bottles of light ale and one pulling a face: silly instead of suave. (In another photograph, four guys are seen in the inevitable aftermath of a light-ale binge: pissing together in a roadside lay-by.) Most of the Teds are white, though in a different shot three out of the five men shown are of South Asian origin—presumably first- or second-generation immigrants from former British colonial territories who have, no doubt, shocked their elders with their ready assimilation to a widely maligned expression of British culture.

Then there are those who are well past the first burst of youth, but have either adopted or retained the stylings of youth culture. One dance-floor image includes a gentleman of advanced years, seen in profile as he leans back with an enviable flexibility, the jiving of his early years standing him in good stead now. In another photo, a middle-aged Ted couple are portrayed, proudly surrounded by their four children, who are also dressed up in the trappings of the style. Most striking among them is the eldest son, dressed in a long velvet frock coat and a battered pair of brothel creepers. He appears to be no older than thirteen—the age at which he is due to embark upon his own teen-age rebellion. The picture doesn’t tell us, but the assertive look in his eye suggests that maybe he will discard his parents’ favored fashions, exchanging them for the floppy fringe and eyeliner of the New Romantics, who in the early eighties scandalized the newly older generation with their flouting of gender boundaries and sartorial conventions.

Whatever the boy’s own teen-age style choices, they will surely be indelible to him, as the Teds’ were to them. Steele-Perkins revisited his subjects for the Observer Magazine more than two decades after he shot them, and he wrote that, at first, he was sad to see how some of them still clung to their youthful identities. But, on further consideration, he revised this view: the Teds were, after all, still up for a good time, still being exactly who they still wanted to be. “Those markers that once quickened our youth can still drive our dotage,” he wrote. “So we move on, the planets turn, we change, grow older and remain more resolutely the same.”