The 80s: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain, exhibition review: ‘A big show with a big takeaway’
Anna Fox’s Friendly Fire, target (Margaret Thatcher), 1989. © Anna Fox
Looking back at Britain in the 1980s, there are many traits that have again become familiar in recent years: political polarisation and anti-immigrant racism, but also the effervescence of subcultural diversity.
Now Tate Britain has put on a photographic extravaganza of nearly 350 images and archive materials drawn from more than 70 lens-based artists and collectives.
Their work documents the ‘long 1980s’, extending from the turbulent period of the late 1970s to the change of political direction in the early 1990s.
The 80s: Photographing Britain includes pictures by photographic luminaries such as Martin Parr, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sunil Gupta, and even Finsbury Park native Don McCullin, better known for his war shots.
Paul Trevor, Outside police station, Bethnal Green Road, London E2, 17 July 1978. Sit down protest against police racism, 1978. © Paul Trevor
Yet the most interesting work is perhaps that of the large number of artists and groups who found new ways of imagining their local communities.
We see lots of Thatcherism of course, as the prime minister’s drive to reshape the country according to her vision of self-sufficiency, patriotism and capitalist aspiration was the backdrop against which virtually everything else unfolded.
But most of all we see the multitudinous reactions to the new political dogma in Downing Street, from Paul Trevor’s searing shots of demonstrations against police racism in East London and David Hoffman’s iconic photo of poll tax protestors kissing on the balcony of Hackney Town Hall to Jo Spence’s feminist artistic activism with the Hackney Flashers collective.
Nidge & Laurence Kissing, 1990, by David Hoffman. © David Hoffman
Indeed, this was a period when feminism emerged front and centre, with the Greenham Common encampment against nuclear weapons occupying newspaper headlines on a regular basis, as documented deftly by Melanie Friend.
The LGBT+ rights movement also exploded into popular consciousness as the tragedy of HIV/AIDs and the struggle against section 28 (a regulation prohibiting local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality) mobilised a new generation of artists.
Visually arresting images such as those by Ajamu and Rotimi Fani-Kayode are the product of the rising cultural confidence of the LGBT+ artistic community during this period.
Ajamu X, Body Builder in Bra, 1990. Tate: presented by Tate Members 2020 / © Ajamu X
The country’s many ethnic groups were also developing their own distinctive, British-born forms of cultural expression and means of fighting discrimination.
These included the Association of Black Photographers, which grew out of seminal exhibitions held in 1986 and 1987 and eventually spawned the Shoreditch gallery Autograph.
Up in Birmingham, Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon organised a pop-up studio where locals of all backgrounds could take pictures of themselves; the famous Handsworth Self-Portraits is a series of idiosyncratic images displaying the joyful creativity of the area’s denizens.
The 80s is a big exhibition with a big takeaway: just how much contemporary Britain owes culturally to the tumultuous period it documents.
The 80s: Photographing Britain runs until 5 May 2025 at Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1P 4RG.