Tate Britain’s 80s: Too much, not enough

From the gritty realism of the miners’ strike and anti-racist protests to the subversive art of staged portraits and image-text works, Tate Britain’s latest show, The 80s: Photographing Britain, attempts to bring to life a decade shaped by Thatcher-era turbulence, revealing the stark divisions within photography throughout the process. Yet, with nearly 350 images from over 70 photographers, Mark Durden asks if Tate Britain has taken on an impossible challenge?


Mark Durden | Exhibition review | 27 Feb 2025

The 80s was undoubtedly very much an important decade for photography in Britain. To a certain extent the political, economic and social turmoil during the Thatcher years was echoed in the seemingly irreconcilable divisions that characterised photography at that time. What comes across from this show is that the core contest and split was centred on the photograph’s role as a document, as the decade saw the emergence of a critical relationship to more traditional observational modes of documentary in favour of staged images, montage and/or the use of text.

For the purposes of this exhibition, the 80s are stretched back to 1976 and forward to 1994. The result is nearly 350 images by a long list of photographers, over 70. While the list is long it is still selective – there are many who are not included, Shirley Baker, Helen Chadwick, John Kippin, Fay Godwin, Susan Trangmar, Nick Waplington, Graham Smith, Hannah Collins, John Goto, Roger Palmer, Raymond Moore, Craigie Horsfield, for example.

Experiencing an image heavy show like this does raise the question as to whether photography is best served by being presented in such large quantities. What does it say about the value given to photography? Might it not suggest that there is still a problem with photography in exhibition form? Part of the agenda is to show the “multiplicities of practices” in the 1980s but what we get is an overly directed and steered “sampling” of photographic work, with lots of captioning labels and explanations, that are not always helpful and add to the informational weight of this show. 

The Tate Gallery (as it was then called, it became Tate Britain when Tate Modern opened in 2000) only collected photographs by artists in the 1980s. Even now, as Tate Britain celebrates work it basically ignored at the time, there still seems to be a certain unease about the document itself. The show begins with documentary, but in doing so uses the work of a range of photographers as an illustration of the events of the turbulent decade – including anti-racist movements, the Handsworth riots, the Miners’ strike, Greenham Common, and the 1990 Poll Tax riots. This busy display of black and white photographs presents a direct use of images as representation, a model later reconfigured or disassembled throughout the exhibition. There are however some continuities of this approach – a room entitled Reflections of the Black Experience, for example, includes powerful documentary pictures by Vanley Burke, whose work is also included in the opening room. His extensive and affiliative portrait of Black life in Birmingham is crucial, as he has said, in “writing our own history”. There are also Roy Mehta’s tender depictions of Afro-Caribean communities in North London. Despite this, I was still left feeling I’d like to see more space and presence given to such photography in this show.

The exhibition opens with David Mansell’s 1977 portrait of Jayaben Desai facing a line of police, during the second year of a strike for union representation at Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories. The inclusion of this industrial dispute at the outset is a nice acknowledgment that photography itself involved worker exploitation. Mansell captures Desai’s dignified presence well – her resistance contained in her look back at the line of white policemen at kerb edge, with her arms crossed like theirs, it is as if she is inspecting them, sussing them out. Subject and content dominate our interest here. But as with pictures like Mansell’s, we are also made aware of the craft of documentary. Pogus Caesar’s pictures of the Handsworth Riots move between the observational, amidst the action, and the more reflexive: a portrait of the artist John Akomfrah reading its newspaper coverage headlined Riot of Death. Ceaser’s photographic detail of an advertising hoarding, collides the marketing slogan ‘Guinness Pure Genius’ with a message from the street scrawled beneath, informing us of an experienced reality that triggered the riots – Police Harassment on Blacks. Simple, direct, yet resonant and memorable.

The following room with fewer pictures, in part because it included photographs that were bigger and in colour, marked a shift in documentary approaches. One wall contained more traditional black and white pictures – by Don McCullin, Tish Murtha and Markéta Luskačová – while three walls were given over to larger colour works by Martin Parr, Anna Fox and Paul Graham. The room is named after the title of Parr’s book of his representation of the “comfortable classes”, The Cost of Living. But his turn to this class, his own class, was in part a consequence of his earlier well-known Last Resort, a depiction of working-class holidaymakers packed into a litter-ridden seaside resort in New Brighton, which is in Merseyside (the show’s catalogue essay gets it wrong and says the pictures were taken in Brighton). Last Resort was presented in a later room centred and themed on the impact of colour photography in the 1980s. The context and delayed presentation of this work is a problem. Class and consumerism are the issues that run through Last Resort and to separate that work out from The Cost of Living tends to downplay this.  

Parr’s flash-lit, fractured social world of middle-class garden parties and private views in The Cost of Living, offers a foil to Paul Graham’s pictures of people redundant and looking for work in the florescent-lit bleak interiors of the UK’s unemployment benefit offices (as they were known in the 1980s): the fall out of deindustrialisation and the effects of Thatcher’s embrace of an American-style market economy. Anna Fox’s portrait of a suited office worker shovelling bacon in his mouth offers a good symbol of the greed and avarice that marked certain sectors at this time. Such ironic and satirical pictures are marked by distance in contrast to the humanism underpinning so much of the photography that starts this show. Tish Murtha’s black and white pictures of unemployed youths – in states of distraction and ennui – in the estates of what were once the centre of heavy industry in the North East, offered a certain continuity from room one. It would have been good if her unemployment pictures had been given more space and presence as a counterpoint to the more familiar and bigger pictures by Graham.

Landscapes taps into another tension and opposition around photography at this time, between a more Romantic approach, exemplified by the beautifully crafted pictures of dramatic and often remote landscape formations by Thomas Joshua Cooper – an influential teacher at Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s – and a more literal disassembly of the genre by Ingrid Pollard. Her polemical multipart The Cost of the English Landscape, with pictures of the artist climbing a stile combined with signs saying PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASS, as well as postcards, maps, text, and photographs of the area of the Lake District National Park and Sellafield, informs us of the exclusions and omissions integral to the construction of an English Idyll. Topographic views by John Davies, record the social and industrial changes in British Landscapes, as he titles them. In one photograph the rocks in the foreground are daubed with the name of the pop band, Duran Duran, another layer in this rich, subtle and detailed registering of Britain’s deindustrialised and deindustrialising landscapes in the 1980s.

An entire room is given over to work that falls under the heading Image-Text and the captioning information panel rightly signals the importance and influence of Victor Burgin, who taught several of the photographers whose work is shown alongside his. But I’m not quite sure why he is represented only by part of his series UK 1976. The catalogue essay even mistakenly states that the images in this series are appropriated. They are not. He took the photographs. Burgin’s later, more intertextual and very influential work from the 1980s is absent. Was this because it was not “Photographing Britain”?     

There is much constructed, studio-based and appropriationist work in this show. A whole room is given over to work by Maud Sulter and Jo Spence. In Sulter’s Zabat, 1989, large gilt-framed colour photographic portraits celebrate Black female artists, writers, musicians, including herself, each staged as a muse from Greek mythology and counteracting their representation in Western art as white women. Jo Spence’s brilliance was that she used performance and comedy to cut to the chase, enlivening and energising a medium that did tend to be used with sobriety in the 1980s: as in Terry Dennett’s deadpan depiction of her standing topless on the doorstep of a terraced house, broom in hand, challenging and mocking photography’s reduction of women and the working class to an exotic spectacle.    

The use of colour in Grace Lau’s back-lit transparencies accents the celebratory tone of her photographs of London’s cross-dressing community. In one portrait taken out of doors in the sun, her subject poses by a soldier of the Life Guard regiment; it’s a nice interaction between them, with his flamboyant military outfit more lavish than the floral dress worn by the person smiling beside him.

Given the extraordinary nature of his rich and extensive portrayal of people in Merseyside in the 80s, it seemed odd to limit Tom Wood’s presence in this show to just four pictures from Chelsea Reach nightclub in New Brighton – exhibited as was Lau’s in the room centred on colour photography (despite Wood fluently moving between colour and black and white in the 80s). There does seem to be an unevenness about the way in which a photographer’s work is shown in this exhibition. Some “sampling” is more selective and limited than others.

In a room given over to three photographers, Black Bodyscapes, there is a strong American influence and presence. Both Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X draw upon and subvert Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Black male nudes. Fani-Kayode’s colourful pictures, mixing the erotics of the Black body with sacred Yoruba rituals and Ajamu X, queering presentations of pumped-up masculinity through dress and performance as in his Body Builder in Bra. Lyle Ashton Harris’ iconic Man and Woman, a picture of the artist and a college friend, both Black and naked, wearing whiteface, evokes a history of racialised representations and also the act of passing as white, forsaking one’s ethnicity as a result of fear or duress. Harris is a US photographer but is shown here because he was included in Autograph’s first exhibition at London’s CameraWork gallery in 1990.

The show closes with a room Celebrating Sub Cultures, including a reconstruction of Wolfgang Tillmans’ first installation with photos and tearsheets taped directly to the wall. He is an artist who is somewhat of an outlier to photography in 80s Britain. He is there to signal the future and a shift from much work from the 1980s, when art and the commercial realm was kept separate or treated ironically. Art’s boundaries with fashion from the 90s were no longer to be so separate – as borne out by a 1991 series by Jason Evans and stylist Simon Foxton for i-D Magazine, mixing a documentary mode and fashion as young Black men are dressed as country gents and posed in settings that evoke white middle-class suburbia. All this seems well and good, but in a show so full and so unwieldy, do we really need this addition to the narrative?  

It is probably an impossible show to do well and there was, certainly on my part, a sense of fatigue and depletion as it went on and on. But it could have been more engaging, more pleasurable. Since the 1980s was notable for its diversity and conflicts over photography, it may have been better to allow for more of the mix and collisions between differing practices, greater “multiplicities” and more surprises. Grouping like with like did not always help. Perhaps it would even have been better to let the work of the photographers recording the tumultuous “long” decade of the 1980s in the first room run throughout the show, colliding with and disrupting our encounter with many of the other works. From Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002 onwards, documentary photography has regularly played an important part in biennales and art galleries. A pity it should be so contained and underplayed here at Tate Britain.♦ 

The 80s: Photographing Britain runs at Tate Britain until 5 May 2025


Mark Durden is an academic, writer and artist. He is Professor of Photography and the Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales. He works collaboratively as part of the artist group Common Culture and, since 2017, with João Leal, has been photographing modernist architecture in Europe.

Images:

1-Jason Evans, Simon Foxton, from the series Strictly, 1991.

2-Syd Shelton, Darcus Howe addressing the anti-racist demonstrators, Lewisham, 13 August 1977.

3-Anna Fox, Friendly Fire, target (Margaret Thatcher), 1989.

4-Chris Killip, ‘Critch’ and Sean, 1982.

5-Paul Graham, Union Jack Flag in Tree, Country Tyrone, 1985.

6-Paul Trevor, Outside police station, Bethnal Green Road, London E2, 17 July 1978. Sit down protest against police racism, 1978.

7-Melanie Friend, Greenham Common, 14 December 1985.

8-Albert Watson, Orkney Standing Stones, 1991. Courtesy Hamiltons Gallery

9-Anna Fox, Work Stations, Café, the City. Salesperson, 1988. Courtesy the Centre for British Photography

10-David Hoffman, Nidge & Laurence Kissing, 1990.

11-Ting A Ling, from Handsworth Self Portraits, 1979 © Derek Bishton, Brian Homer & John Reardon. Courtesy The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

12-Maud Sulter, Zabat, Terpsichore, 1989 from Zabat, 1989. Courtesy Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

13-Paul Reas, Hand of Pork, Caerphilly, South Wales, 1985-88.

14-Peter Fraser, Untitled, from Arnolfini Series, 1984.

15-Zak Ové, Underground Classic (John Taylor), 1986.


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Photo London 2023

Top five fair highlights

Selected by Alessandro Merola

With 125 galleries from over 50 cities, the eighth edition of Photo London proves that amidst the emergence of ‘disruptive’ new technologies, the miracle of the darkroom is as alive today as it has ever been. Here are five standout displays from the UK’s largest photography fair – selected by 1000 Words Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola.


1. Prince Gyasi
Maât Gallery

Prince Gyasi steals the show at the booth of Paris-based Maât Gallery, which has newly-established a small but exciting roster of artists with close ties to west Africa. A bold and fresh talent who shot to fame with his inspiring iPhone shots offering alternative visions of daily life in an around Accra, Gyasi is staging brilliant new works here which will bounce your senses like a pinball machine. Enlivened by an Afropop-dubbed palette – packed with colours as vibrant as if squeezed directly out of a paint tube – these exuberant, dreamlike utopias channel Gyasi’s synaesthetic sensibility, in turn prizing perception over objectivity. Making a memorable appearance is a paper plane-hurling fisherman whose image appears unburdened by stereotypical Western visual scripts of “Africa”. As for the other protagonists, they are equipped with cardboard wings, fish and giant eggs. Gyasi utilises everyday symbols that border on the mundane, and edits them into the sublime.

2. Sakiko Nomura and Chieko Shiraishi
Galerie Écho 119

Never failing to disappoint is the Discovery section, where Galerie Écho 119 is amongst the many young galleries making a strong first impression. Unmissable are the Polaroid triptychs of Sakiko Nomura, which are characterised by a soft, female gaze. Curiously, in the early 1990s, she served as the (only ever) assistant of Nobuyoshi Araki, who is also represented with a selection of Polaroids. But it is Chieko Shiraishi’s spine-chillingly beautiful, moonlit prints which make this booth a standout. Splayed across the wall in a way that makes one wonder where each begins and ends, they are products of zokin-gake, an old Japanese retouching technique involving the wiping of a rag. By way of Shiraishi’s conjuration of an intricate web of gradual transformations – one which evokes the twin figures of experience and emptiness with nuanced sensitivity – subject becomes subservient to content. The subject may be a mass of fog that swallows a spiralling staircase, or the footprints that creep up a desolate, snow-clad alley. The content is Shiraishi’s response to what she saw; shorthand notes from her spirit. 

3. Jack Davison, Photographic Etchings
Cob Gallery

Photography-as-magic – as uncloaking the image through rag-rubbing, Polaroid-shaking or otherwise – is also evidenced in a dazzling presentation by London’s Cob Gallery. Those who were impressed by Jack Davison’s Photographic Etchings exhibition last year – and left wanting to see more from the artist’s archive – will welcome this latest outing. The booth compiles an absorbing selection of Davison’s black-and-whites – previous photogravures, new works as well as unseen artist proofs – that, together, relinquish such immersive drama. They are tactile things, suspended in frames like fragments wherein truth is always out of reach. Any of photography’s indexical factualness that remains in these introspective gravures lingers only as a vague aura of the technology which aided in their production. After all, although they are derived from photographs, they appear as distant cousins of the source image. For Davison, the camera is a tool, and, if the photograph endures, it is merely as a material memory of the process, squarely situated within the tradition of etching.

4. Hideka Tonomura, mama love
Zen Foto Gallery

Since the families of Nan and Mann, respectively, redefined the stakes for documenting one’s own tribe, one particularly dramatic case of a photographer probing the ambiguous relationship between the camera and intimacy is undoubtedly Hideka Tonomura. Arranged alter-like on a wall at Zen Foto Gallery – one of several galleries at this edition hailing from Asia – mama love unveils a vital and cathartic threesome: the revenge of the artist’s mother against her tyrannical husband; a rebellion against the ordeal she endured for years. Whilst Tonomura becomes less a witness and more an accomplice in this adulterous affair, by “burning out” the male protagonist in the darkroom, the artist seems to suggest that he, if anything, gets in the way. Tonomura’s series is not deliberately provocative, nor does it revel in sexual voyeurism. Instead, it is the patient record of a conversation between a mother and daughter, and a rediscovery of their love for each other. It’s both radical and radiant.

5. Chris Killip and Graham Smith
Augusta Edwards Fine Art

Off the back of 20/20, last year’s very special joint presentation at Augusta Edwards Fine Art, it is satisfying to see the two great British photographers Chris Killip and Graham Smith side-by-side once more. The latter is lesser known, of course, but there is a strong case to be made that the two really ought to be mentioned in the same breath for their exceptional, community-focused documents of people living in the North East’s edges during the Thatcher years. Where Smith very much belongs to Middlesbrough, the industrial town in which he was born and raised, Killip was an outsider determined to earn the trust of Tyneside’s working-class. Nevertheless, their respective works lack any critical distance from their subjects and are both borne from a similar time-intensive, personal involvement. There is graft and there is grace in these two peerless photographers. Smith’s shot of the historic Forty Foot Road is powerful, sobering and formally beautiful, whilst humming as a scene of life is Killip’s portrayal of Helen – upside down and limbs akimbo – who stars elsewhere in his seminal chronicle of Lynemouth’s sea-coalers. Within this little facet of social history, one finds humanity in spades. ♦

Photo London runs at Somerset House until 14 May 2023.


Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Images:

1-Prince Gyasi, Airbon II (2023). © Prince Gyasi. Courtesy Maât Gallery.

2-Prince Gyasi, Limitless (2023). © Prince Gyasi. Courtesy Maât Gallery.

3-Sakiko Nomura, Untitled (date unknown). © Sakiko Nomura. Courtesy Galerie Écho 119.

4-Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled (c. 1990s). © Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy Galerie Écho 119.

5-Chieko Shiraishi, Notsuke, Hokkaido (2012). © Chieko Shiraishi. Courtesy Galerie Écho 119.

6-Jack Davison, Untitled (2023). © Jack Davison. Courtesy Cob Gallery.

7-Jack Davison, Untitled AP2 (2022). © Jack Davison. Courtesy Cob Gallery.

8-Jack Davison, Untitled (2023). © Jack Davison. Courtesy Cob Gallery.

9>10-Hideka Tonomura, mama love (2008). © Hideka Tonomura. Courtesy Zen Foto Gallery.

11-Graham Smith, The Forty Foot Road in the Old Iron District of Middlesbrough (1978–79). © Graham Smith. Courtesy Augusta Edwards Fine Art.

12-Chris Killip, The Laidler family, Lynemouth, Northumberland (1983). © Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos. Courtesy Augusta Edwards Fine Art.