New Photography Show at Tate Britain Reveals the Other 1980s
Not everyone in the 1980s had a Filofax and a GTI. The images presented to us in slick movies and glossy magazines like this one – pinstriped yuppies barking into brick phones, flouncy fashion students dancing to synth pop – will resonate with just a tiny minority of people who lived through that contested period, when British society was remade by a Prime Minister who didn't believe such a thing existed.
For those who didn’t work in the City, or who weren't habitués of the Blitz or Taboo (or who were Black, or gay, or women, or Northern...) the self-styled designer decade summons other images: Orgreave and Greenham Common; Toxteth and the Troubles; dole queues and the Aids crisis. The flipside of the Thatcher years.
At Tate Britain in London this month, a new exhibition focuses for the greater part on the grit rather than the glamour, as documented by photographers such as the great Chris Killip, whose pictures, like the one above, show a 1980s Britain left behind, or frozen out, by the loadsamoney anti-ethics of deindustrialisation, regulation, privatisation and the many other innovations – socioeconomic and political (the Poll Tax, Section 28) – introduced by the nation's most consequential postwar leader.
Also represented are the photographs of Brenda Prince, John Harris, Syd Shelton, Vanley Burke and the Cartier-Bresson of the British mundane, Martin Parr.
If some might query the inclusion of more than a few works made in the 1970s and 1990s, then perhaps the 1980s was a state of mind – or a series of contrasting states of mind, increasingly dystopian in cast – as much as a date-stamp.
The show includes colour photography, but overwhelmingly the 1980s are depicted in black and white, appropriate for an era when the chasm between Britain’s haves and have-nots began to widen and, in the process, to come into sharper focus. We are all Thatcher’s children, but only some were able to capitalise on her revolution. Here are the divisive moments.
‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ is at Tate Britain from 21 November to 5 May 2025
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