Another Kind of Life captures the world’s most elusive countercultures and persecuted communities

Exhibitions like this risk veering into the realms of gross fetishisation: treating their subjects like circus acts, and putting them on pedestals for voyeuristic purposes rather than to inform whoever’s viewing it. But the exhibition’s title alone manages to reject that; these people live alternate lives – not bizarre ones, and many of the image-makers involved are photographing them because they feel like it’s their duty to do so.

Errázuriz was somebody who treated her work as a tool for positive political change. Her Adam’s Apple (1983) series respectfully captures the lives of Chile’s trans sex workers, the photos aching with the strength of the people they’re depicting. In one, a transgender woman is strewn across a bed in a dilapidated bedroom; in another, a woman is seen in a wig and a cable-knit sweatshirt, gently resting her hand on her elderly mother’s shoulder. The motivation of a photographer is a daunting thing to consider when the world has previously paid you no mind, but Errázuriz’s work captures a spirit of defiance. They’re evidence that these women lived through such fraught times, and exist to ensure we never forget it.

The art world has fawned over photographers who tread the fine line between artist and photojournalist like Errázuriz for decades, Larry Clark being another known for diving intimately into ostracised communities. He played a key role in making unsightly art part of the American cultural conversation when Kids, his cinematic portrait of New York’s disenfranchised, skateboarding, drug-taking youth, cracked the box office back in 1995.

The harsh reality of surviving as an addict couldn’t be more visceral and unattractive than in the photographer’s seminal photobook, Tulsa, excerpts of which also feature in Another Kind of Life. Shot across the 60s and 70s, Clark captured his friends as they drank, smoked and fucked their way through their early 20s – alongside Clark himself – creating poignant and raw portraits of 20th century American youth. “It was such a secret world and I was one of the guys,” Clark said of the time spent shooting the series in a 2002 interview. “I was an insider.”

Thanks to the laissez-faire attitude the protagonists in his films tend to adopt, Clark is often accused of glamourising drug and sex-fuelled subcultures, but what seems exploitative and dangerous on the surface could be construed as a scathing and explicit commentary on the state of America, both then and now. Today, the images from Tulsa etch themselves into the minds of those who see them. Remarkable, yet distressing, they have a socio-political purpose that still feels relevant – especially as we try and tackle the prescription pill addiction epidemic plaguing young people today.

Around the same time Clark was capturing the desolation of drug-infested middle America, Britain was buzzing with youth subcultures, fuelled by an obsession for American rock ’n’ roll, style and mindless violence. The Teddy Boys in particular made up a huge part of this. Famed for their romantic, Edwardian-style dress, their presence in the country’s bars and social clubs was marked by Chris Steele-Perkins while he was working as a photojournalist in his 20s.

“It just grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go,” he tells me when I ask how he wound up taking photos of the men who ran with their own packs, causing violence and hysteria. “We spent a couple of years hanging out [and] documenting them. I liked the way it gave an identity and a sense of pride to kids who had very little in their lives, but made the most of it.” His portraits of the coiffure-haired, cigarette-smoking bandits, which are part of a wider collection titled The Teds, are captured relics of a rebellious uprising. These lads were a gang of young outcasts formed by their own building of barriers. In their eyes, it was us against them.

Some 30 or 40 years after they were first taken, these photographs act as historical hallmarks of a political mood we wish remained in the past: of addicts seeking help and not getting it; of young lads inciting violence in order to be heard, and of the trans community wishing they could survive without facing abuse and ostracism. You would have hoped we might have come much further in a time that’s seen photography and art progress so rapidly: digitising, with analogue swiftly becoming a romanticised and archaic way of capturing the world. But instead, Another Kind of Life serves as a sobering reminder, not only of the progress we’ve made, but of the painstaking work that still needs to be done.