Pistol-packing photos on tour

Dennis Morris started taking photographs in 1969, aged nine. He wanted to go to Vietnam as a war photographer but in the end he didn't have to take off in search of conflicts to picture: they came to him.

Morris, son of a single Jamaican mother and one of the few black kids in his Dalston school, bunked off at 14 to hang around a club door in the hope of snapping Bob Marley, which resulted in his being asked to tour with Marley and The Wailers as photographer.

The photos caught the attention of John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, and Morris got offered the best possible domestic slot for a wannabe war photojournalist: The Sex Pistols' tour photographer in 1977, when the shock, the violence, the drugs and the fame were all at a peak.

Morris, with his affection for a one-point perspective that compels the eye towards his subject, is very gifted - his photo of Marley, teeth bared in an acme of pained cool, joint to his lips, is justly famous.

But in The Sex Pistols he also got a gift of a subject. Pictures range from the chaos of Sid Vicious's hotel room, where a rubble-strewn floor and hollowed-out TV set bear witness to the guitarist's drug-and drink-fuelled resentment at being deprived of his girlfriend, Nancy, for the tour's duration, to various more endearing pictures of Vicious (who apparently pulled faces at cameras out of shyness), as well as Rotten posing and the Pistols in full concert mode: you can almost hear the ears split and the spittle fly.

These photos first appeared here in 1998 but, with their aesthetic and historical impact and the sharp depiction of a youth revolution the Pistols both exploited and epitomised, it's hardly surprising they're back so soon.

Destroy: The Sex Pistols
Until Sept 2, Proud Central, 5 Buckingham Street WC2, daily 10am to 7pm, £3, £2 concs.
Tel: 020 7839 4942. Tube: Embankment/Charing Cross