Karlheinz Weinberger, Oliver Sieber

Claire Bishop11 April 2012
The Weekender

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The older you get, the more freakish to the eye teenage subcultures appear.

As every adolescent will tell you, the devil is in the detail: correct exaggeration of clothing can be a matter of life and death. Every gang has its fetish, and in 1960s Zurich this was enormous hair (for the girls) and enormous buckles (for the boys). And when I say enormous, I mean it: the coiffures are a miracle of Elnett, and the buckles are plate-sized homages to Elvis.

The man who documented this short-lived style fad is Karlheinz Weinberger, now 81 years old. You can imagine him 40 years ago, watching these kids zipping round on their mopeds, bringing American rebellion to the clean streets of Switzerland and terrifying its citizens. His crisp black-and-white photographs also have an undertow of nostalgia for his own youth, aligning his work with Larry Clark's more sexually explicit pictures of teenage exploits a decade later.

At the back of the gallery is a Nan Goldin-style slide show of Hell's Angels from the late Sixties onwards. Tattoos and tits, bums, bikes and beards - it's nothing short of a marvel that Weinberger makes such an elegiac document out of such greasy subject matter. Festival horrors abound - the plastic beerglass-strewn fields, the inevitable bloke face down in a ditch at dawn - but Weinberger's presentation differs from Goldin in being mercifully spared of music, and in wryly relishing the horrors before him. He pairs the images (a little obviously at times) to maximise analogies between the bikers' tattooed backs and the airbrushed kitsch on their bike shields.

At times it all gets a bit too reader's wives and is a far cry from the sly homoeroticism of his early Sixties work, with its attention to customised crotches and rippling abs - but there's no doubt that the Hell's Angels look is a curiously timeless phenomenon.

Oliver Sieber's pictures of D¸sseldorf mods and rockers, on show next door, play just as elusively with time. The images are three years old, but they could be 30. Sieber's lean, ascetic style is now a familiar trope of contemporary German photography, but he eschews piercing direct eye contact with his subjects. Instead, he lets these youngsters quietly turn away, allowing us to scrutinise the details of their dress. Mascara, big collars, a gelled quiff - belonging to a tribe, as I said, is in the details.

Showing at the Photographers' Gallery until September 21, 5-8 Great Newport Street, London WC2. Call 020 7831 1772 for more information.

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