Linton Kwesi Johnson

Johnson isn’t mentioned anywhere in this exhibition but thinking about the 1980s made me dig up favourite playlists, and I ended up writing most of this review listening to his great 1979 album, ‘Forces of Victory’.

Introduction

Sometimes you wonder whether exhibitions at the Tate galleries are really about art at all any more, but aren’t more like polemically woke sociology lectures, with art, photography, sculpture and other evidence used merely as illustrations for a familiar set of well-worn, ‘radical’ themes.

This exhibition contains rooms or sections devoted to immigration, race, race riots, racism, the Black Experience, the Black Body, the Queer Black Body, feminism, identity, gender, colonialism, imperialism, immigration, sectarianism, pollution and environmentalism. As you can see, these look like the topic tabs on the Guardian website or a list of fashionable humanities subjects at any modern university.

As to the lived experiences of anyone not a left-wing activist, not a feminist, not Black or Asian, and not gay or lesbian during the 1980s, these are less in evidence than the subjects I’ve just listed and where they do appear, it’s mainly to be mocked and ridiculed.

I visited with a friend and we loved the first room because it is packed with a Greatest Hits selection of political issues from the 1980s: photos of anti-racism demonstrations (by Syd Shelton and Paul Trevor), of Rock Against Racism gigs, of the Miners Strike (by John Harris and Brenda Prince), of Greenham Common (by Format Photographers), protests about Section 28 and AIDS, all leading up to the Poll Tax riots – yes, all the usual suspects, shot in vivid black and white, which took us both back to our heady student days.

But as the exhibition progressed her enthusiasm turned to puzzlement and then irritation and, by the end, she was so fed up with being lectured about identity and gender and race and queer Black bodies that she gave up. She described it as the worst exhibition we’ve been to this year and I came to agree. If you read all the wall captions (as I’m addicted to doing), it felt like being trapped in a lift full of woke humanities lecturers all talking at the same time.

‘No title’ from the series Strictly by Jason Evans (1991) Tate © Jason Evans

The central problem with this exhibition

I naively thought the exhibition would be a portrait of the 1980s, that the curators would make an honest attempt to give a balanced account of this troubled decade and the wide range of social and cultural changes it witnessed, as captured in photography – that it would be a visual history of the decade.

Very wrong. What the curators have done is to make a personal selection of just the radical photographers from the period who covered what they think are the important issues (then, as now), the disruptors, the radicals, the subversives. And, as mentioned, although they initially touch on many of the obvious issues of the time (the Winter of Discontent, Thatcher, Miners Strike, unemployment, inequality, Greenham Common, poll tax) this is not where the curators’ hearts lie.

The curators are far more concerned with contemporary woke issues of gender and ethnicity than with genuinely trying to reach back and understand what it was like to live through the 1980s, as my friend and I (and, obviously, scores of millions of other Brits) did.

The result is an exhibition which feels top heavy with the woke curatorial concerns of our own day – gender, race, colonialism, immigration, inequality – but feels like it misses out important aspects of the decade in they’ve chosen to cover.

While the wall labels are fairly neutral and factual about the political history (Callaghan government; winter of discontent; days lost to strikes; Thatcher elected; deindustralisation; working class poverty; anti-nuclear protests) the actual exhibits are utterly one-sided, with a plethora of photos, pamphlets and posters decrying the authorities, the police, the government, for their racism, lack of concern for the poor, inequality, tax and regulation changes to benefit business and the middle classes, and so on.

While all these criticisms are true, they fail to take account of the key fact of the decade which is that Mrs Thatcher was, and continued to be, phenomenally popular with about 40% of the population. Here’s how many voted for her three Conservative administrations.

• 1979: 13,697,923 (44%)
• 1983: 13,012,316 (42%)
• 1987: 13,760,583 (42%)

Lots and lots of people thought Britain had gone down the drain in the 1970s, thought the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan were in hock to the trade unions who, despite all their promises, seemed to be continuously on strike, while all manner of public services collapsed – that Britain was becoming a failed state or Third World country.

In this narrative, Thatcher not only saved Britain from endless decline under Labour, but went on to remodel the entire economy, letting unprofitable nationalised industries go to the wall while privatising other state monopolies in order to enable international investment (for example, modernising the dire railway network or allowing greater innovation in telecoms). The deregulation of the City of London allowed British banks and investment companies to compete more aggressively around the world and become phenomenally successful. Selling council houses to their owners (as per the 1980 Housing Act) allowed millions of poor people to feel the pride and security of owning their own home for the first time. And, on the patriotic front, her staunch attitude in the Falklands War and victory against quite daunting odds, allowed tens of millions of Brits to feel proud about their country again.

I personally disagree with a lot of this or can point out the obvious criticisms of most of these policies – but 40% of the population enthusiastically agreed with it, saw the world this way, voted for her, and hero-worshipped her.

And my point is simple: None of that is in this exhibition. This is an exhibition of radical feminists, Black and Asian civil rights marchers, gay rights activists, of campaigners against race hate and misogyny and unemployment and nuclear weapons etc. It is like a collection of all the fringe groups you find at a Labour Party conference vying for the attention of those in power who are always too busy to listen, today as 40 years ago.

The large number of people who were relieved by the breaking of union power, the end of permanent strikes, the people who made fortunes in the City or found their pay doubling in newly privatised companies or suddenly owned a home for the first time in their lives or felt the government was (unlike labour) seriously backing them in the war against the IRA, all the people who benefitted from the booming North Sea oil industries in Aberdeen or working on the rigs, all the people who were encouraged by the new spirit of entrepreneurism to set up their own business and prospered – none of them are here.

To be clear, and to bend over backwards for the curators, the main wall labels which introduce each room and give the historical facts behind each theme are broadly objective historical summaries, albeit of the predominantly leftish issues they’ve chosen to discuss. It’s the selection of photos and objects which are unrelentingly one-sided, tendentious and biased and it is, of course, these which make the main impact on the visitor.

For example, the exhibition includes a photo by Anna Fox of this jokey cutout of Mrs Thatcher which has been splattered with orange or something. But to really convey the atmosphere of the decade it should have included many more images of Thatcher, including some of the terrifying ones of her at her most domineering. Now I think about it, the show could have had an entire section devoted just to images of Mrs Thatcher, showcasing all the photographic and image manipulation styles of the day, from adoring Conservative posters to satirical photomontages by Peter Kennard or photos of the Spitting Image puppet of her. That would have been interesting, funny and thought provoking but no. Just this image of the cutout spattered with soup. Disappointing. Missed opportunity. Photos of the woman who dominated a decade.

Friendly Fire, target (Margaret Thatcher) by Anna Fox 1989 © Anna Fox

The relentlessly left-wing perspective of the curators quickly comes to feel so narrow. Can it really be true that every single photographer, photographic studio or collective during the entire 1980s was vehemently left wing, concerned only with radical causes, with ‘pushing boundaries’ and ‘subverting’ all the usual suspects (gender norms, heteronormative stereotypes, racist myths etc)? Can the entire decade‘s photographic output really have been so narrow, repetitive and obsessed with the same handful of left-wing themes and issues?

Facts about the exhibition

This is a vast show: ten rooms, 16 themes, over 70 ‘lens-based artists and collectives’ are represented by over 550 art works and archive items: lots of ‘radical’ photography magazines such as Ten.8 and Camerawork; lots of posters, leaflets, handouts, Greenham Common posters and flyers and badges, anti-racism pamphlets, posters etc. It is massive. Prepare to be overwhelmed and exhausted.

No reasonable human being can be expected to fully process and assess 550 photos and objects at one go – so the curators are either assuming people will go back a second time (probably a good idea) or will hop from one section to another, or will skim through and not give anything enough attention (all too likely).

The negative affect of this jumble-sale overcrowding is exemplified by the sections devoted to the black-and-white documentary photography of two photographers I revere, Tish Murtha and Chris Killip. I raved about their depictions of dirt-poor working class communities when I first saw them in shows at the Photographer’s Gallery entirely devoted to their work, when they had a devastating impact on me. Tish Murtha, in particular, was a photographer of genius.

But here, half a dozen of their (outstanding) photos are wedged in between 6 by someone else, 9 by someone else, 4 by someone else, 7 by someone else, a section about Asian identity, another about the Black Experience, some stuff about pollution in Devon, a sequence of seaside snaps… and so on and so on until the whole thing becomes a blur. They both deserve a better environment and more respect.

Critch’ and Sean by Chris Killip (1982) Tate © Chris Killip

It’s the difference between walking through a landscape, stopping to give every tree and plant time and attention – and driving through the same landscape in a car, noticing the occasional standout feature against the general blur.

Chronological slippage

The exhibition is so huge that it overflows its own boundaries. It is everywhere referred to as ‘The 80s’ and yet the first photo dates from 1976 and the last one from 1993. That’s a 17-year spread, not a ten-year one. It feels bloated chronologically as well as content-wise.

Exhibition structure

At one point I drafted a long section comparing my own lived experience of the 1980s (including going on protest marches as a student, then living in the Brixton depicted in some of these photos, clubbing, protesting, walking through one of the Brixton riots etc) with the depictions given here but it got too long and irrelevant. Instead here is a boiled-down version of Tate’s own exhibition guide (which you can read in full here).

As you can see, the opening sections tick all the boxes, contain interesting facts and seem set fair to give you an interesting historical overview of the decade. It’s only slowly that the curators’ obsession with race and gender become more prominent and you begin to wonder, and then become irritated by, the absence of so many other things.

First a list of what is in the exhibition. Then my list of what, in my opinion, has been omitted.

1. Documenting the decade

Protests and riots from the 1976 Grunwick strike through the Miners Strike, National Front rallies met with anti-racist demonstrations, the Clash playing their famous Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park, the election of Mrs Thatcher and the ideology of Thatcherism, Greenham Common (obviously), the poll tax riots.

Paul Simonon of the Clash at a Rock Against Racism concert, Victoria Park, East London, April 1978, photo by Syd Sheldon/White Riot, in The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain

2. Anti-racist movements

The 1948 British Nationality Act allowed everyone born in Britain or its Empire to become a ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ and tens of thousands came to fill job vacancies. Regrettably, sometimes tragically, this triggered hostility and racial discrimination, marking the beginning of decades of racist rhetoric, rioting and civil rights activism. 1968 Enoch Powell’s river of blood speech. By the mid-1970s, the far-right, anti-immigration National Front was England’s fourth largest political party. So the show has many photos of their rallies and protests by opponents (and posters, badges and flyers), including quite a few about the so-called Battle of Lewisham which took place on 13 August 1977.

Darcus Howe addressing the anti-racist demonstrators, Lewisham, 13 August 1977 by Syd Shelton (1977) Tate © Syd Shelton

Was 1977 in the 1980s? No. Why is it in the exhibition? Because this isn’t an exhibition about the 1980s: it is an exhibition about radical causes the curators support, and which had their origins in the 1970s.

Also, a bit of digging revealed that quite a few of the black-and-white protest photos in this first room are loans from the National Portrait Gallery a mile up the road. Handy. And they’re not just dusty old photos from the archive but are, in fact, star entries in the National Portrait Gallery’s Schools Hub. This includes the Darcus Howe photo and the photo of Jayaben Desai by David Mansell.

3. The Miners’ strike

In March 1984, the National Coal Board announced plans to close 20 collieries, putting 20,000 jobs at risk. The National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill, responded with a series of year-long strikes. Observed across England, Scotland and Wales, the strikes put industrial issues and workers’ rights on the national agenda. Many dramatic photos including the famous one of a mounted policeman wielding a baton against photographer Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave, 1984.

4. Greenham Common

On 5 September 1981, a group of women marched from Cardiff to the Royal Air Force base at Greenham Common in Berkshire. The site was common land, loaned to the US Air Force by the British Government during the Second World War and never returned. The group called themselves Women for Life on Earth. They were challenging the decision to house nuclear missiles at the site. When their request for a debate was ignored, they set up camp and the site became a women-only space. The camp lasted for 19 years although it was after only 6 years, in 1987, that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan signed a treaty which paved the way for the removal of cruise missiles from Greenham.

Greenham Common, 14 December 1985 by Melanie Friend (1985) reprinted 2023. © Melanie Friend, Format Photographers

I smiled when the curators proudly explained that Gorbachev subsequently paid tribute to the role ‘Greenham women and peace movements’ played in this historic agreement as if they, the curators, were partly responsible for its achievements. And I also liked the implication that you should always believe what a Russian politician says.

The massive political exhibition which filled the same Tate Britain galleries before this, Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990, also featured an entire room about Greenham Common. My friend jokingly suggested that maybe every Tate exhibition should have a section devoted to Greenham Common: The Pre-Raphaelites and Greenham Common. Victorian sculpture and Greenham Common.

5. Poll Tax

The community charge, commonly known as the ‘poll tax’, was introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1989 in Scotland, and 1990 in England and Wales. This flat-rate tax on every adult replaced previous taxation based on property value. The tax was accused of benefitting the rich and unfairly targeting the poor. The national anti-poll tax movement began on the streets of Glasgow and led to a series of anti-poll tax actions across the UK. Many demonstrations saw clashes between police and protestors, and resulted in rioting. The fallout from the tax triggered leadership challenges against the prime minister and, in 1990, Thatcher resigned. In 1991, following vehement national opposition, John Major’s Conservative government announced the poll tax would be replaced by council tax.

So news photos of anti-poll tax marches, some of which turned into riots, ‘ordinary people’ carrying placards, burning cars in Trafalgar Square. Ah, those were the days.

Nidge and Laurence Kissing by David Hoffman (1990) © David Hoffman

6. The Gay Rights Movement

In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised sexual acts between two men. It was the result of decades of campaigning but did nothing to address the discrimination gay and lesbian communities continued to face. So photos of LGBTQ+ people protesting for equal rights.

In 1981 the UK saw its first identified cases of AIDS. By 1987 the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a global health crisis. The public focus was largely on gay men who were being infected in much greater numbers than the general population, fuelling anti-gay rhetoric in politics and the press. Queer activists organised in opposition to the resulting homophobia, as well as Conservative ‘family values’ campaigns. Do you remember some media labelling it the gay plague? Bigotry on a national scale. Lots of photos of anti-homophobia and AIDS awareness marches.

7. (Political) Landscapes

This is the first and, as it turns out, pretty much the only section which isn’t about political protest, gender awareness and Black issues. But don’t imagine it’s pretty photos of the British Isles. It, also, takes a heavily ‘theoretical’ i.e. politicised approach to its subject.

This section points out how the entire concept of ‘landscape’ is socially, culturally and politically constructed, and how the British tendency to see the countryside as cosy and reassuring often conceals the way the land has been a battlefield for rights to common land and to roam.

Also, in line with the gloomy focus elsewhere in the show, there’s an emphasis on landscapes as places of deindustrialisation and ruins, and as degraded by pollution and fly tipping.

That said this room contained some of the best sets of images, neither part of the obvious political issues of the first few rooms nor of the gender and race obsession of the second half of the exhibition. Having walked through the whole exhibition twice I found myself gravitating towards this room for the understated, sometimes elusive quality of its photos.

For example, I liked the red river sequence by Jem Southam, a set of 12 colour photos of the country around a stream in west Cornwall. None of them individually are ‘great’ photos but the fact there’s 12 of them collectively creates a great sense of location and strangeness. And the dramatic black-and-white study of a standing stone on Orkney by Albert Watson.

Orkney Standing Stones by Albert Watson (1991) © Albert Watson. Courtesy Hamilton Gallery

But the pull of politics is unavoidable. Nearby are upsetting images from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, namely The Walls by Willie Doherty, and the disturbing series Sectarian Murder by Paul Seawright. This records the sites where murdered bodies were found, after the bodies had been removed and they had returned to their normal, litter-strewn banality.

Even this apparently bucolic image by Paul Graham contains the tiny detail of a Union Jack high up in the tree which, in its little way, throws the shadow of 800 years of history across the green fields and blue sky.

Union Jack Flag in Tree, Country Tyrone by Paul Graham (1985) © Paul Graham

8. Remodelling history

Extensive coverage of radical feminist photographers Jo Spence and Maud Sulter who set out to ‘challenge photography’s sexist and colonial past’, and its relationship to class politics.

Remodelling Photo History: Revisualization by Jo Spence (1982) Tate © The Jo Spence Memorial Archive

There’s a surprising amount about these two figures, Spence and Sulter, including a separate section on Spence’s collaboration with artist Rosy Martin to develop photo-therapy. As with other Tate exhibitions, maybe there’s so much of it simply because Tate owns their archive and needs a pretext to display a decent amount of their work. (We’ll see the same is true of the unexpected prominence given to an American photographer, Lyle Ashton Harris, at the end of the show. Tate owns them so this is a prime opportunity to dust them off and display them.)

9. Black women

There’s a separate section devoted to Maud Sulter who’s quoted as saying, ‘Black women’s experience and Black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalised’, and so set about rectifying this in series of photos of her dressed up in period costume looking like an extra from Bridgerton.

Zabat, Terpsichore, 1989 from Zabat by Maud Sulter (1989) © Estate of Maud Sulter. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2023. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

10. Image and Text

A section on the use of text in photos, texts designed to amplify or undermine the central image. There is much citing of the artist and theorist Victor Burgin who, the curators tell us, was very influential during this period. He’s represented by some of his series of large, poster-sized photos which include ironical texts, titled ‘UK 76‘. 1976? But I thought this was an exhibition of photography from the 1980s? No. As with all the photos of anti-National Front marches, the Battle of Lewisham and so on, the curators bend their own rules and boundaries when it suits them. (As with the Jason Evans photo at the top of this review, and Albert Watson’s Orkney Standing Stones, both from 1991 and so spilling over the other end of the boundary.)

This section also included some big poster-sized images of rubbish new townscapes with official-sounding quotes from brochures pasted on top (which I liked very much). And it’s the section with the satirical images of office workers by Anna Fox (with mockingly ironic text) and Kroll’s sequence of posh chaps in private clubs (with mockingly ironic text) which I’ll describe below.

10. Reflections of The Black Experience

This is the biggest room in the exhibition. It takes its name from ‘Reflections of the Black Experience’ which was an exhibition held at Brixton Art Gallery in 1986, commissioned by the Greater London Council’s Race Equality Unit. It was followed by D-MAX: A Photographic Exhibition in Bristol.

Both exhibitions played an important role in the development of the Association of Black Photographers, which is now called Autograph ABP. Established in 1988, Autograph’s mission was to advocate for the inclusion of ‘historically marginalised photographic practices’. Working from a small office in Brixton, the agency delivered an ambitious programme of exhibitions, publications and events. Autograph is now one of my favourite small galleries in London, which I’ll discuss below.

There’s lots in this big room, including photos of Brixton from the later 1980s, when I lived there. The display that made the most impact on me was the brilliant series of Handsworth self portraits. This project was set up by Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon in which they set up a makeshift studio in Handsworth, a multicultural part of Birmingham, and invited people to take self portraits of themselves. Over 500 people took part and the joy of people messing about, as solo shots, in pairs or larger family groups, is infectious. Once again, though, as throughout the show, works are included from outside the nominal time range because, well, they’re good.

Ting A Ling, from Handsworth Self Portrait, 1979 © Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon

11. (Political) Self portraiture

You might have thought this would feature a fascinating range of self portraits by people across society throughout the ten years of the 1980s but no, this is Tate and so only a handful of social groups really count, namely radical feminists, Black activists and LGBTQ+ people. In the curators’ words:

In the nineteenth century, photography was a valuable tool for colonial powers. Ethnographic images of Indigenous Peoples and landscapes were distributed through postcards and magazines. They ‘othered’ subjects and created racist stereotypes that legitimised the mission of empire. The photographs on display here challenge this colonial gaze. They present nuanced, multi-dimensional representations of Black and Asian British selfhood.

So the self portraits in this section are entirely concerned with subverting imperialist, colonialist stereotypes. They link up with the series in the last room by Grace Lau of him or herself dressing up as types from the decade in order to subvert gender norms etc.

From the series ‘Interiors’ by Grace Lau © Grace Lau 1986

Black activists or gender activists. Little attempt to consider the myriad other types of self portrait taken outside these areas, by anybody else, at any other part of the decade.

12. Community

This room hosts series from half a dozen photographers who went to live with communities around the UK to share their experiences and create accurate depictions. Most are in black and white with a 100% left-wing focus on poverty, crappy housing, unemployment, aggressive policing and racial stereotypical. It includes outstanding photos by Chris Killip which, for some reason, didn’t hit me as hard as when I saw his one-man show at the Photographers’ Gallery. I think being set next to the work of 3 or 4 other photographers (for example, the equally as good Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen) doing more or less the same, attenuated all of them.

13. Colour photography

A room full of big, blaring, gaudy colour photos. Apparently, Britain’s first exhibition of photography taken on colour film was Peter Mitchell’s 1979 show at Impressions Gallery in York. During the 1980s technological developments continually improved the quality of colour photography and this room brings together sequences of giant colour photographs by Martin Parr, Paul Reas and Tom Wood. Because they are almost entirely very unflattering photos of very ordinary white people I came to think of it as the Chav Room or the White Trash Room (fuller explanation below).

• Looking for Love by Tom Wood
• The Last Resort by Martin Parr
• I Can Help by Paul Reas

14. Black bodyscapes

In case you didn’t get enough Blackness in the opening room about anti-racist protests, in the room about Black women or the massive room about The Black Experience, here is a room devoted to the Black Queer Experience. The assembled photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ajamu X and Lyle Ashton Harris ‘explore masculinity, sexuality and Blackness’.

Fani-Kayode was described by Ajamu X as ‘the most visible, out, Black, queer photographer’ of the 1980s’. Ajamu X’s desire to document ‘the whole of Black queer Britain’ has been dubbed ‘Pleasure Activism’. Harris describes his photographs as a celebration of ‘Black beauty and sensuality’. The photos of Ajamu (black and white) and Fani-Koyode (moody, shadowy colour) are, in their different ways, staggeringly impactful.

Body Builder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990) Tate © Ajamu X

15. Celebrating subculture

The final room. You might have thought that a documentary look at the ‘subcultures of the 1980s’ might have covered some of the movements closely associated with ever-changing fashions of pop music such as post-punk, industrial music, Goths, New Romantics, synthpop and, later, Madchester, acid house, raves and so on. These affected how people dressed, thought about themselves, danced, partied, affected not just styles of music but graphics, album art, posters and many other types of visual content.

But no. None of that is here. Tate curators only know two subjects, race and sex, gender and ethnicity, and so they ignore all the pop cultures I’ve listed. Instead, at the mention of ‘subculture’ their thoughts immediately go to gender issues, to LGBTQ+, and to the furore surrounding the notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act.

The wall labels go into great detail about how Section 28 prohibited local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’ and triggered a wave of protest from gay and lesbian communities. They tell us how Section 28 forced many LGBT groups to disband and saw literature depicting gay life removed from schools and libraries, but that it also galvanised the Gay Rights movement. People took to the streets in a series of marches and so, with thumping predictability, the exhibition ends with lots of photographs of people protesting, marches, banners etc, very much as in the first room, or the Greenham Common room, or the Black Experience room.

If you’re maybe a little bored by the subject of gay activism, tough, because not far away there’s photos by Tessa Boffin who ‘subversively reimagines literary characters as lesbians’, while nearby Grace Lau ‘documents members of various fetishist sub-cultures’.

To be crystal clear, none of this is ‘bad’ in itself, some of it is very good. It’s just that by this stage the visitor who’s been reading all the wall labels is exhausted by the curators’ obsessive harping on just the same two or three subjects to the exclusion of everything else.

End of exhibition summary

I suppose I could stop here, having given you a good summary of what there is to see and my own negative response to it. And you might be wise to stop reading here. But several things triggered me so much I needed to work them through in print.

Omitted subjects

As explained, my friend and I got increasingly frustrated as we looked for evidence of the other, non-political, non-woke aspects of the 1980s which we and millions like us like us experienced. Without trying too hard I made a list of the domestic and international events, music, style and commercial changes which I associate the decade with.

Take sport. There’s nothing about sport at all. Apparently there was no sport during the 1980s and no sports photography. Even if you wanted to ‘keep it Tate’ and make sport as political as possible, they could have mentioned the disastrous Bradford City stadium fire, the legislation which followed forcing all football grounds to become all-seated, and the resulting accusations that the sport was losing its working class fanbase and becoming embourgeoisified. And there were lots of other sporting events, highlights and scandals. But not a hint here.

Pop music. There’s one photo of The Clash performing at a Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park and that’s it. Nothing else: no industrial rock, post-punk, synth pop, New Romantics, no Smiths and, at the end of the decade, no Madchester, no ecstasy, no raves, no ambient music. There’s a wall of style magazines at the end, sections on the impact of, for example, i-D magazine, but somehow the curators’ focus purely on design manages to omit the extraordinary output of a decade many consider the greatest era in British pop history. Where’s Wham for God’s sake?

This was the decade when MTV arrived in the UK (1981) and its reliance on pop videos changed the dynamic of how people consumed pop. Same with cable TV generally, and the arrival of Sky TV (1984) with its crazy aerials. I appreciate these aren’t photographic but someone must have taken photographs of them and of this huge transformation of the cultural and visual landscape. Not here.

No jazz. No classical music. None. They didn’t exist during the 1980s or if they did, no one took any photos of them. Whereas I remember in the early 1980s transitioning away from pop music altogether and listening to the likes of Courtney Pine, Loose Tubes or Andy Shepherd. OK they’re not photographers, but it felt like a big cultural shift at the time and surely someone took photos of them.

World music same. Lots of young people got fed up with boring old rock music and sought new sounds from around the world. WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) was founded in 1980 and the first WOMAD festival was held in Shepton Mallet 1982. Nothing here.

Live Aid, remember that, Saturday, 13 July 1985? Not here, not a whisper, not so much of the event itself, but as the invention of really epic mass charity events which it invented. It was based around images because of Bob Geldof’s response to Michael Buerk’s reporting of the Ethiopia famine. I know that’s TV reporting, but there were lots of photographs of it (of the famine and of the concert). Why is Greenham Common included but Live Aid, which was a vastly bigger event and, arguably, more socially transformative, not? All curators are feminists. 39 iconic photos of Live Aid at London’s Wembley Stadium

Fashion photography? No. None. There’s a wall about style magazines but this is chiefly about the magazine design itself: I saw nothing recording the drastic new looks which appeared in the early 1980s, the New Romantics, Blitz nightclub, big hair, big shoulder pads which became crazy fashionable. According to this exhibition, never happened. 38 Iconic ’80s Fashion Photos.

The royal wedding On Wednesday 29 July 1981 Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. It was a huge social and media event. If you think about it, royal photography is a specialised area or genre all to itself. As with Mrs Thatcher, the curators could have done an intellectually reputable section on how royal images are created, curated, marketed and disseminated, mocked and satirised. 70 Rare Photos From Princess Diana’s Wedding.

The Brighton bombing on 12 October 1984. See the relevant photos by brilliant photojournalist John Downing.

Architecture The 1980s was the great decade of postmodernism in architecture with its flagship building, Lloyds of London. Surely there were photographers specialising in the built environment across the UK and in particular this completely new look which swept across Britain? Not according to this exhibition. A Spotter’s Guide to Post-Modern Architecture.

Foreign reporting? Live Aid was of course a response to the Ethiopian famine and, in particular, the work of photojournalist Mohamed Amin, but there is no photography of events outside the UK in this exhibition. I take the point that the curators decided to limit their scope to the UK, but images of the major foreign stories of the decade were published in the UK and many taken by British photographers. So why aren’t they included here? How Mo Amin Inspired Change in Ethiopia

Chernobyl? No. No British photography of any aspect of it.

The Mujahideen in Afghanistan? Signature images of the decade were the reports on the evening news by some BBC or ITV journalist wearing a keffiyeh or pakol hat while Islamic freedom fighters fired off a Stinger missile in the background. Did no British photographers take any photos of this ten-year war? If they did, why are they excluded from this exhibition? To take one example from hundreds, the Afghan War photos of Scottish photographer David Pratt.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989. That was a massive, world historic event with photos and footage beamed into every home. The curators can quote Gorbachev when it suits their agenda, when he’s praising the Greenham women, but on none of the other vast issues of the 1980s, namely the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union in which he was the prime actor.

Photos linked to film and theatre, glitz, actors, red carpets – forget Hollywood, just here in the UK? No. Didn’t happen during the 1980s. None here.

One of the biggest domestic stories of the decade was the deregulation of the City of London, nicknamed the Big Bang, which transformed the worlds of finance, banking and insurance, and made lots of people very rich, with far-reaching consequences for the British and maybe global economies. There’s text about it in the room labels but not a single image. Surely someone took photos of the changing culture in the City of London? No? Why not?

North Sea oil? Nada. Did no British photographer take photos of oil workers, Aberdeen, the creation of the refining infrastructure in that boom town? No photographer made a project of recording all this?

And what about The Falklands War (2 April to 14 June 1982) which had a seismic impact on British society and politics – footage of ships setting sail, news photos of battles, muddy paratroopers yomping through the long grass, looking shattered after a firefight, guarding nervous Argentinian captives, the celebrations when the ships arrived back in Portsmouth or Southampton? Even, if you are a Tate curator and insist on taking a left-wing view of the war, surely there was a world of anti-war photos, posters, and what not. Here are 30 Photographs From The Falklands Conflict they could have borrowed from the Imperial War Museum. But no, nothing, zip. Zilch.

Summary

Can you see why I became increasingly dismayed, and then irritated, by how many issues, events, music and fashion styles, new industries and technological innovations that were absolutely central to the 1980s the Tate curators left out because they didn’t fit their handful of woke concerns?

Omitted ethnic groups

As I’ve shown there is plenty of stuff about Black photographers, Black resistance, Black identity, Black photographic practice, Black selfhood, Black representation and much more and yet there are other ethnic groups in the UK – where are they?

From the series Revival, London by Roy Mehta (1989 to 1993) Courtesy of the artist and L A Noble Gallery

It’s not that extensive coverage of Black issues is ‘wrong’, it’s that the curators’ monomaniacal obsession feels like it comes at the neglect of all the other issues, types of people, professions and experiences alive in 1980s UK. Here are some wall labels to recreate the experience:

Frustrated by the misrepresentation of Black people in British mainstream media of the period, Zak Ové used his camera to challenge this visual discourse.

Dave Lewis‘s photographs of Black British communities in South London emphasise the diversity of experiences within these communities.

Marc Boothe‘s photographs sought to challenge traditional documentary practices and introduce viewers to a ‘Black aesthetic’.

Suzanne Rodan‘s candid shots capture moments of everyday life within Black and South Asian communities in 1980s London.

In Impressions Passing Roshini Kempadoo manipulates photographic prints to reflect how racist imagery is perpetuated in modern media.

Ajamu‘s portrait photographic series Black Bodyscapes focuses on intimate sexual desires.

Autoportrait is a series of nine self-portraits which challenge the under-representation of Black women in British fashion and beauty magazines.

Magenta Dress with Pink Tulips by Joy Gregory (1984) Courtesy of the Artist © Joy Gregory. All rights reserved, DACS

To be fair, there’s also quite a lot in the early rooms about the Asian experience, starting with the very first photos of the 1976 Grunwick strike which was triggered by Asian women walking out of the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Dollis Hill. In that first room there are photos of Asians protesting about racism, against police violence (again, from the 1970s). The ‘Representing the Black Experience’ room also contains images of many Asians. The Communities room has some quieter photos celebrating Asian communities, religious festivals and so on.

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

I smiled when I saw the section devoted to Indian-born Canadian photographer Sunil Gupta. Gupta also has a wall dedicated to him at the Barbican exhibition of contemporary Indian art, and had no fewer than three sections dedicated to him in the Barbican’s epic exhibition about Masculinity.

Why is Sunil Gupta so popular with art curators? Because he is Asian and gay and so ticks two boxes in the curator’s diversity and inclusion checklist. No exhibition of 1980s or ’90s photography dare be without its Sunil Guptas. Now, you may love Gupta’s work but I found the photos at the Barbican and again, here, very meh. He is represented by ‘Pretended Family Relationships which juxtaposes portraits of queer couples with the legislative wording of Section 28 in order to subvert the blah blah bah. They seemed very average to me, but they are gay activism, so he’s in!

Anyway, despite the Asian presence in many of the photos, the word ‘Asian’ appears precisely once in the exhibition guide while the word ‘Black’ appears 27 times. Draw your own conclusion.

And were they any other ethnic groups in the UK in the 1980s? Apparently not. I tell you a word which doesn’t appear anywhere in the exhibition, which is ‘Jew’. Apparently there were no Jewish photographers in Britain during the 1980s and no Jews to photograph. In the ‘Community’ room there are (inevitably) Black communities, Asian communities and working class communities, but no Jewish community. Didn’t exist or no one bothered to photograph it.

In the same spirit of omission, there are no photos by or of Chinese, Arabs or Muslims. They either didn’t take photographs during the 1980s or have been omitted by the curators. Why? Hispanic communities, all the Brazilians in Stockwell, or European immigrants like the Poles, or the Somalis of Streatham, just to mention ethnic communities I live near? No. Nada.

Because feminism, Black and queer is where the money is. It’s where the academic courses and academic careers are. When I flicked through the exhibition catalogue and saw chapters titled ‘Feminist praxis’ and ‘Challenging colonialism’ I couldn’t help laughing. That’s where the money is, kids. Specialise in those areas and you’ll never be unemployed. Unlike being a trawlerman or a steel worker, being an expert in feminist praxis or post-colonial theory is a career for life.

Underground Classic (John Taylor) by Zak Ové (1986) © Zak Ové

Why Yanks?

Remember I was irritated by the lack of coverage of central events of the 1980s like Chernobyl, Afghan War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and so on while it seemed fine to have stuff about strikes or race riots from the 1970s? You could argue that those pivotal events are omitted because they’re in some sense foreign / happened abroad – which is why I was irritated by the presence of an American photographer, Lyle Ashton Harris, in the exhibition.

Why, you might well ask, are nine photos by American photographer Lyle Ashton Harris (born and works in New York) of American subjects – including one titled ‘Miss America’ – included in an exhibition about Britain and British photographers in the 1980s? Why is one entire wall devoted to four massive self portraits of the American photographer wearing bits of ballet costume?

Constructs 10 to 13 by Lyle Ashton Harris (1989) Tate

Because 1) Harris is Black and queer and, with Tate curators, Black or Queer trumps all other considerations, including the criteria of their own exhibition.

Because 2) America is like heroin to art curators. Everything ends up being about America.

And because 3) it turns out, after a bit of digging, that Tate owns these big Lyle Ashton Harris photos and so, like the room devoted to extensive coverage of Jo Spence and Maud Sulter – whose archives Tate also owns – it’s a good example of the way exhibitions are created around what a gallery already owns, or what curators can cheaply get their hands on, rather than an accurate, objective exploration of the nominal subject matter.

Conclusion

I hope you can see now why I told you this is very much not a photographic history of Britain in the 1980s – it is a selection of ‘radical’ left-wing, feminist, politically committed Black and Asian or LGBTQ+ photographers who were working from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s, some of whose work touches on social or political issues from the time, but a lot simply doesn’t. Unless you consider gay pride or feminism or anti-racism as uniquely 1980s phenomena – which, of course, they very much weren’t and aren’t.

Photos of the white working class

Amid the radical deconstructions of colonialism and the subverting of heteronormative stereotypes and celebrations of the Black Queer Body, there are some powerful photos of British working class life. Two of the best photography exhibitions I’ve ever been to were of Tish Nurtha and Chris Killip at the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, and both are represented here by half a dozen or so photos of supernatural power. In this vast show they were, however, swamped by so many other images along similar lines, and so neither of them had the devastating power of their Photographers’ Gallery shows.

There’s a set of vividly squalid colour photos by Paul Graham of the unemployed waiting like souls in hell in smelly 1980s job centres. Ken Grant took grim photos of working class people in and around Liverpool. There’s an excellent set of black-and-white photos of working class white people on the Meadow Wall Estate in North Shields taken by Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen.

Apparently it was in the 1980s that the phrase poverty porn was first used and, somehow, having so many series of stark black-and-white photos of poor people living in squalid or sad circumstances, demonstrated the law of diminishing returns. They began to seem rather samey. Again, this feels like an example of poor curatorship.

Photos of the white middle class

And what about the middle class people, the political, cultural and demographic centre of the United Kingdom? Not just the 13 million who consistently voted for Mrs Thatcher but all the people who made up the bulk of the population: the accountants or lawyers, doctor and dentists, people running family businesses or working at big corporations, the police and fire and ambulance services, people who worked in local government, the social services, in thousands of care homes, in the hundreds of thousand of charities, ordinary people? Not Black or gay or radical feminists or horribly impoverished Brits, but run-of-the-mill, ordinary people like the hundreds I saw visiting this exhibition, people like you or me?

Well, it was hard to not to conclude that these kinds of people, what you could call the white bourgeoisie, appear in this exhibition solely to be mocked and ridiculed. Anna Fox is represented by a series titled Work Stations which satirises people working in London offices. These are horribly vivid colour shots of ordinary office workers captured in the most awkward and unflattering poses, accompanied by ironic captions pinched from business articles and magazines in order to take the piss out of them and their values. Here’s a prime example. The text under the photo reads ‘Fortunes are being made that are in line with the dreams of avarice’, from Business magazine 1987.

Work Stations, Café, the City. Salesperson by Anna Fox (1988) © Anna Fox. The Hyman Collection, Courtesy of the Centre for British Photography

Next to Fox is the Old Master of colour photodocumentary, Martin Parr, represented by works from his ‘Cost of Living’ series (1986 to 1989). Parr felt the kind of people he mixed with, the comfortably-off middle class, had been systematically under-represented by 1970s and ’80s photography, so he set out to depict them. So he simply went along to art gallery openings, garden parties, Conservative party fetes, and photographed the people he saw. Because it’s Parr deploying his customary, unforgiving colour technique, all these people come out looking extraordinarily awkward and ugly, just like the people in the Anna Fox series.

• The Cost of Living series by Martin Parr

The mere fact that an expert on contemporary photography believed that this huge tranche of the British population, the middle classes, the inhabitants of Middle England, was under-represented in his medium speaks volumes about the narrow ideological focus of the photography of his day. And the way both Fox and Parr’s photos are described as ‘satirical’ confirms how this huge class of people have become, as pictorial subjects, almost an outsider group in their own country.

Installation view of the ‘satirising the white bourgeoisie’ corner at ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ at Tate Britain, with the Anna Fox sequence at the back, Martin Parr on the right. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)

Near to the Parr ‘mocking the middle classes’ photos is a selection of 9 photos from the 26 in the famous series Gentlemen by Karen Knorr. Knorr was given permission to photograph the very posh members of the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs in London’s St James’s district. Beautifully staged and shot, she then ironically undercut the images with texts taken from news reports and parliamentary speeches (just as Fox had done with her office workers). Again, the aim is to mock and satirise.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that all of the depictions of the English middle classes in this exhibition are associated with irony and satire. Now, nobody takes the mickey out of the Black or Asian or women subjects – they are all portrayed as dignified or joyous or righteously angry. But posh white people? Look at the ugly, rich, privileged wankers air kissing, answering phones, stuffing their faces!

The Colour Photography room gives interesting explanations of the technological developments which made colour photography cheaper and better – but it, also, flays its white subjects mercilessly. It includes another series by Parr, his famous seaside scenes, The Last Resort, in which everyone is captured in bright colour with unforgiving candour.

Next to them are half a dozen similarly merciless photos of very ordinary people in Welsh supermarkets by Paul Reas. Like Parr’s photos, like Fox’s series, these seem so pitilessly unflattering as to be actively cruel. The Photography of Cruelty. Or maybe just mockery. Look at the poor white chavs.

Hand of Pork, Caerphilly, South Wales by Paul Reas (1988) © Paul Reas. Martin Parr Foundation

White trash, Black gods

The humiliation of white chavs and poshos in Parr and Fox and Wood’s photos is emphasised by the way that, in the rooms directly before and after them, Black people are depicted in stylish black-and-white photos which make them look dignified, noble or even godlike.

In the room before the white chavs is this set of serious, searching portraits made by Pogus Caesar. They were taken on an Ilford HP 5 camera using 35mm film to achieve a rich grainy effect as he travelled round the country taking shots of people in the street, as far as I can see, solely Black people. They’re really good. Stylish and atmospheric, they dignify and enrich their subjects.

Installation view of ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ at Tate Britain showing ‘Into the Light’ by Pogus Caesar (1985 to 89) (photo by the author)

The room after the white trash room is the one titled ‘Black Bodyscapes’, the one featuring photos by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ajamu X and Lyle Ashton Harris, photos which ‘explore masculinity, sexuality and Blackness’. I dare say these are important issues to the curators but to the ordinary visitor what you see is a set of spectacularly buff Black male bodies. Wow! Gorgeous, hunky men in prime physical condition, what’s not to lust after?

The Golden Phallus by Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1989) © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Autograph ABP. Courtesy of Autograph ABP

(I first encountered both Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X at the drolly titled A Hard Man is Good to Find! exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, and loved them both. I dare say they’re exploring this issue and subverting that stereotype but they are also extraordinarily sexy pictures of beautiful male bodies.)

Anyway, it’s impossible to miss the stark contrast between the dignified Black people in Pogus Caesar, the stunning Black nudes of Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X, and the 15 or so images of the pale, pasty, fat, badly dressed white people captured by Wood, Parr and Reas in the Chavs Room. Step into the Black room to be thrilled. Then back into the white room to be appalled. This isn’t a contrived comparison. The two rooms are right next to each other. They make for an unavoidable and extremely powerful visual contrast.

Autograph ABP versus Tate

Autograph ABP in Hoxton specialises in photography by Black photographers from around the world and is maybe my favourite small gallery in London. Everything I’ve ever seen there has been outstanding. It is a centre of photographic excellence and I was interested to read about its history in the ‘Representing the Black Experience’ room here in this show.

But it also made me wonder, why do I love Black photography at ABP but bridle at the exact same work when it is shown here in Tate Britain? Three reasons. 1) The attitude of the curators. At ABP it is taken for granted that the work is by Black photographers. There may be some stuff about combatting racism, if relevant, but quite often the labels just explain the specifics of the particular project. The ABP curators treat their artists and visitors with respect, as if they’re grown-ups.

Whereas Tate curators can’t stop haranguing their visitors about the horrors of racism and colonialism and the white gaze, as if we’re first year arts students who need to have all the evils of the world explained to us in a tearing hurry. The photographers’ Blackness or queerness becomes the primary thing about them.

This is what I meant be saying the Tate curators treat their artists and works as specimens in extended lectures on their handful of woke topics, about the evils of capitalism and colonialism and racism and sexism, explaining all these issues in words of one syllable or less as if it’s the first time their visitors had ever heard of such things.

So I’m not bridling at the photographers or their works. In other contexts I’ve really loved many of them. I’m reacting very negatively to the patronising tone of Tate’s curators.

2) Individually, many of the works here are great but something negative happens when a load of works by different photographers are all bunched together in a room demonstrating a thesis. So, for example, when I first saw Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photos, I read the captions about the queer sensibility and undermining stereotypes of Black male sexuality etc, but I also responded to their plain weirdness. To what they look like. These are strange, disconcerting, haunting images which trigger responses beyond the verbal or easily expressed. They did what all good art does which is take you to strange places in the imagination, open doors you didn’t know were there.

But here, lumped together in one room, they feel subservient to the curators’ concerns to lecture us all about the Black Queer Body. This is what I mean by turning art into specimens, pinned like butterflies to a board to make a point.

3) Bulk. Volume. Sheer number. Same point I made about Tish Murtha and Chris Killip. Seen by themselves, their work felt seismic. Bundled together with half a dozen photographers working on the same subject (dirt-poor white communities), and making the same point (Thatcherism, inequality, poverty = bad), a lot of the power and individuality leached out of them.

Message to the curators

1. Less is more.
2. If you’re going to group lots of artists together, doing it by their most obvious feature (feminists, Black, queer, working class) tends to diminish their individuality and impact. Think of more imaginative, left-field ways of arranging them. Try to create surprises.
3. If you claim your exhibition is about a subject, please make an effort to make it fully and adequately about that subject and don’t just restrict it to the handful of woke subjects dear to your hearts plus chucking in some archives you happen to own. Make it about the world, not just the same three curator obsessions (gender, ethnicity, class).

Yet another conclusion

So you can see why, by the end, I was fed up of being lectured about the wonders of queerness and feminism and the Black body and post-colonial identity, and deeply disappointed that so much of the actual history of the 1980s, the global incidents or – just to restrict it to the UK – the key social and media events, and the changing face of technology, music and style which meant so much to me personally, had simply been left out.

This is why the friend I went with thought it was the worst exhibition we’d visited all year: because of its glaring omissions of loads of the things we liked and remembered about the 1980s, because of its systematic rewriting of cultural history to be only about radical left-wing artist-activists, because of its flagrant political bias, because of its mockery of the white middle class which (I’m afraid) I belong to (just like everyone else I saw visiting this show) but, above all, because of its terrible, terrible narrowness of vision.

Well, I’ve given you a strong flavour of my own negative reaction to the thing, but I’ve also tried to give an accurate summary of the exhibition structure, objective summaries of all the rooms, and a good selection of the images, along with the curators’ own words.

This is a massive, exhausting and deeply problematic exhibition – but there’s lots of very good stuff in it and maybe you’ll have a completely different response. Go along and make your own mind up.

Related links

• The 80s: Photographing Britain continues at Tate Britain until 5 May 2025
• The story of 80s Britain, as seen by 7 notable photographers

Related reviews

• Tate Britain reviews
• Photography reviews