Beginning as a photographer and picture editor for a student newspaper, over the course of the years he has been occupied with social documentary projects, foreign reportage, travel, architecture and landscape photography. He has repeatedly adapted his style and approach to his subjects. In the 1970s Steele-Perkins (b. 1947) was primarily involved with the social problems of the large British inner cities. At the same time he was working on an extensive project that in 1979 would result in his first book, The Teds. In it he offers a detailed picture of the last of the British Teddy Boys, the fashionably clad and provocative British subculture that arose in the 1950s. The book has long been regarded as the classic example of British post-war documentary photography.