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Oxford's North Wall Arts Centre brings together for the first time photographs of teddy girls (and boys), taken by ground-breaking film director Ken Russell. Before becoming famous as a director of films such as Women in Love, Tommy and The Devils, Russell worked as a freelance photographer, and began taking photographs in 1951, aged 23. 

Ken Russell has been described by film critic Mark Kermode as "someone who thought with his eyes"; Russell himself called his photographs his "still films". The images, all taken in 1955, are exceptional as they feature mostly girls, often staring directly and defiantly at the camera. As Russell said: "No one paid much attention to the teddy girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys. They were tough, these kids; they'd been born in the war years…they knew their worth. They just wore what they wore."

The teddy girls and boys are photographed on London streets, at funfairs, at stage doors, leaning on graffiti-covered brick walls, on derelict East End bomb sites and outside the Seven Feathers Club where they did the popular Ted dance, The Creep. Several of the images feature a strikingly contemporary looking 14 year old Jean Rayner: "she had attitude by the truckload", said Russell.