Beginning in Glasgow and Edinburgh in 2004 and continuing through his long-term work in Belfast, Toby Binder’s photographs document youth, football culture and everyday life in working-class communities in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Toby Binder was born in Esslingen, Germany, in 1977 and studied communication design at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. During his studies, he became increasingly interested in making photographs rather than designing other people’s stories. A degree project concerned with football in Scotland provided an early foundation for the social documentary practice he has developed over the following two decades.
Binder first visited Scotland in 1996. Returning in 2004, he photographed young people in Glasgow and Edinburgh, including the Gorbals, Sighthill, Craigmillar and Niddrie. Football appeared across the work: on streets and informal pitches, in backyards and on areas of open ground.
The Scottish photographs formed part of Binder’s wider Youth of the UK project and his related study of football, Kick it like Mc, which considered the social importance of the game across different classes, communities and religious traditions in Scotland.
Binder was interested in football as an everyday activity rather than a professional spectacle. The photographs concentrate on the places where children encountered the game for themselves, often with little equipment beyond a ball and an available patch of land.
Reflecting on his first visit, Binder described being struck by the enthusiasm surrounding Scottish football and its importance within communities. He later wrote that street football represented “the essence of sport”, teaching that “one doesn’t have to be successful to love something or feel passion for it.”
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
From these Scottish beginnings, Youth of the UK developed into a broader study of young people in working-class districts of former industrial towns and cities. Binder photographed in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, concentrating on communities affected by unemployment, economic disadvantage and limited opportunities for younger generations.
The photographs do not form a survey of youth across the entire country. They follow a more concentrated route through particular communities and social environments, examining how young people use streets, shared spaces and football grounds, and how friendship and local identity operate within them.
Across the wider project, Binder retained the approach first developed in Scotland: spending extended periods in particular communities and photographing children and teenagers in the streets and shared spaces they used each day. This sustained attention, rather than an attempt to survey youth across the country, became central to his later work in Belfast and Duisburg
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
Binder first photographed in Belfast in 2006. Following the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership, he returned and began concentrating more closely on young people living in working-class areas of the city.
Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union overall, but voting patterns reflected existing political and community divisions. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement established the framework for Northern Ireland’s peace settlement, but many areas in Belfast remained divided along Protestant–unionist and Catholic–nationalist lines, with physical interfaces and peace walls continuing to separate communities.
Working across six communities associated with both traditions, Binder photographed teenagers facing many of the same pressures despite their limited contact with one another. His work concentrates on these shared conditions — unemployment, social discrimination, violence, drugs and restricted prospects — alongside friendship, humour and the ordinary experience of growing up.
Many of the young people Binder photographed were born after the Good Friday Agreement. They had not experienced the Troubles directly but continued to live within a city shaped by the conflict and its divisions. As Binder has put it, the intention was to show that “there is more linking them than separating them.”
Binder has described his approach as “all about time and honesty”. He returned repeatedly, showed people photographs from earlier visits and maintained contact with the communities he photographed. Trust developed through a continued interest in the teenagers and their lives, including the time spent with them when there was no photograph to be made.
The resulting project, Wee Muckers – Youth of Belfast, was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2019, with a text by Belfast-born writer Paul McVeigh and design by Birthe Steinbeck. The title comes from a local phrase meaning “little friends”, reflecting the friendship and solidarity at the centre of the work.
McVeigh’s introduction distils the project’s central idea in a line about identity as an accident of birth: “I was one street away from being born my ‘enemy’.” The book is now out of print.
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
Binder continued photographing in Belfast beyond the publication of Wee Muckers, and the work’s later chapters have brought some of its most significant recognition. Divided Youth of Belfast took first place in the Documentary Projects category of the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards Professional competition. In February 2026, The Divided Youth became the inaugural winner of the Visa d’Or Online, established by Visa pour l’Image with support from the Douglas Kirkland Estate.
Nearly two decades after Binder’s first Belfast photographs, the project remains active.
Alongside his British work, Binder has developed long-term projects concerned with young people and communities affected by poverty, conflict and social inequality in Germany, South America, Africa and other parts of Europe. His book #053KIDS, documenting young people in the Hochfeld district of Duisburg, was published by Dietz in 2026.
His photographs have appeared in publications including Stern, Die Zeit, The Guardian, Le Monde, The Washington Postand Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His work has been presented at Somerset House in London, Photoville in New York, Stadtmuseum Osnabrück and Copenhagen Photo Festival, among others.
Selected earlier recognition includes the 2019 Felix Schoeller Photo Award, second place in the 2018 Philip Jones Griffiths Award, and UNICEF Photo of the Year honourable mentions in 2017 and 2021.
Seen together, the photographs made since 2004 form a sustained document of working-class youth in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The locations and political contexts differ, but Binder repeatedly returns to common experiences: friendship, football, unemployment, social pressure and the use of streets and shared spaces. More than twenty years after the first Scottish photographs, his wider study of youth continues through the ongoing Belfast work.
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
Photo © Toby Binder, all rights reserved.
British Culture Archive first published this selection of Toby Binder’s work in May 2022. British Culture Archive represents the selected photographs presented in this feature and the accompanying gallery for image licensing and BCA-published print editions.
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Rights and Licensing
The photographs presented in this feature and the accompanying gallery are available for image licensing through British Culture Archive. For editorial, publishing, exhibition and other uses, contact contact@britishculturearchive.co.uk.
Article originally published 25 May 2022. Updated July 2026.
