David Hoffman, Nidge & Laurence Kissing 1990 © David Hoffman
Tate Britain presents The 80s: Photographing Britain, a landmark survey which considers the decade as a pivotal moment for the medium of photography. Bringing together nearly 350 images and archive materials from the period, the exhibition explores how photographers used the camera to respond to the seismic social, political, and economic shifts around them. Through their lenses, the show considers how the medium became a tool for social representation, cultural celebration and artistic expression throughout this significant and highly creative period for photography.
This exhibition is the largest to survey photography’s development in the UK in the 1980s to date. Featuring over 70 lens-based artists and collectives, it spotlights a generation who engaged with new ideas of photographic practice, from well-known names to those whose work is increasingly being recognised, including Maud Sulter, Mumtaz Karimjee and Mitra Tabrizian. It features images taken across the UK, from John Davies’ post-industrial landscapes to Tish Murtha’s portraits of youth unemployment in Newcastle. Important developments are explored, from technical advancements in colour photography to the impact of cultural theory by scholars like Stuart Hall and Victor Burgin, and influential publications like Ten.8 and Camerawork in which new debates about photography emerged.
The 80s introduces Thatcher’s Britain through documentary photography illustrating some of the tumultuous political events of the decade. History is brought to life with powerful images of the miners’ strikes by John Harris and Brenda Prince; anti-racism demonstrations by Syd Shelton and Paul Trevor; images of Greenham Common by Format Photographers and projects responding to the conflict in Northern Ireland by Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright. Photography recording a changing Britain and its widening disparities is also presented through Anna Fox’s images of corporate excess, Paul Graham’s observations of social security offices, and Martin Parr’s absurdist depictions of Middle England, displayed alongside Markéta Luskačová and Don McCullin’s portraits of London’s disappearing East End and Chris Killip’s transient ‘sea-coalers’ in Northumberland.
A series of thematic displays explore how photography became a compelling tool for representation. For Roy Mehta, Zak Ové and Vanley Burke, who portray their multicultural communities, photography offers a voice to the people around them, whilst John Reardon, Derek Bishton and Brian Homer’s Handsworth Self Portrait Project 1979, gives a community a joyous space to express themselves. Many Black and South Asian photographers use portraiture to overcome marginalisation against a backdrop of discrimination. The exhibition spotlights lens-based artists including Roshini Kempadoo, Sutapa Biswas and Al-An deSouza who experiment with images to think about diasporic identities, and the likes of Joy Gregory and Maxine Walker who employ self-portraiture to celebrate ideas of Black beauty and femininity.
Against the backdrop of Section 28 and the AIDS epidemic, photographers also employ the camera to assert the presence and visibility of the LGBTQ+ community. Tessa Boffin subversively reimagines literary characters as lesbians, whilst Sunil Gupta’s ‘Pretended’ Family Relationships 1988, juxtaposes portraits of queer couples with the legislative wording of Section 28. For some, their work reclaims sex-positivity during a period of fear. The exhibition spotlights photographers Ajamu X, Lyle Ashton Harris and Rotimi Fani-Kayode who each centre Black queer experiences and contest stereotypes through powerful nude studies and intimate portraits. It also reveals how photographers from outside the queer community including Grace Lau were invited to portray them. Known for documenting fetishist sub-cultures, Lau’s series Him and Her at Home 1986 and Series Interiors 1986, tenderly records members of this community defiantly continuing to exist.
The exhibition closes with a series of works that celebrate countercultural movements throughout the 80s, such as Ingrid Pollard and Franklyn Rodgers’s energetic documentation of underground performances and club culture. The show spotlights the emergence of i-D magazine and its impact on a new generation of photographers like Wolfgang Tillmans and Jason Evans, who with stylist Simon Foxton pioneer a cutting-edge style of fashion photography inspired by this alternative and exciting wave of youth culture, reflective of a new vision of Britain at the dawn of the 1990s.