Like a blast of hairspray to the eyes, the Tate is about to blind you with the ’80s. This expansive, exhaustive and exhausting exhibition features dozens of photographers and hundreds of photographs depicting all the turbulence of that most turbulent of decades.
It opens with Greenham Common, the miners’ strike, Rock Against Racism, the poll tax and the gay rights movement. Dozens of black and white images depict riots, protests, banners, shouting and marches. At first it hits all the right spots: anger, resistance, a nation in turmoil and all these amazing photographers there to capture it. But then you realise that half of these photos, these events, are from the 1970s, and it all falls apart. What it does do however is set the tone of the show: by 1980, Britain was so broken, divided and impoverished that the coming decade was going to be a wild ride.
The second room is maybe the best in the show: Martin Parr hobnobs with the comfortable classes as they chit chat at soirées and art openings and Anna Fox infiltrates offices to watch deals getting done; while Tish Murtha captures the abject dereliction of life on the dole and Paul Graham brilliantly snaps candid images of filthy, miserable waiting rooms at the Department of Health and Social Security.
From there we’re taken on a journey through all the big issues of 80s Britain. The troubles are here in the work of Paul Graham, environmental destruction in Keith Arnatt photos, the everyday reality of poverty rears its ugly but often joyful head over and over in the colour-saturated images of Tom Wood and Paul Reas or Chris Killip’s shockingly bleak photos of the industrial north. Racial identity and the reality of life for Black Britons comes up repeatedly through the work of Zak Ové, Suzanne Roden and Joy Gregory. The camera captured the reality of life on the margins, but could also be used as a voice, a way of making your true self heard in a society that won’t listen.
The camera captured the reality of life on the margins, but could also be used as a voice
Because the camera isn’t just a tool of documentary. Artists like Jem Southam, Jo Spence and Mitra Tabrizian take more conceptual approaches. Southam follows the journey of a stream through a slowly disappearing English countryside, tabrizian constructs cinematographic images as metaphors for the Black voice, and Spence uses the camera to construct, explore and tear apart her own identity.
That’s why the room of works by Ajamu X, Lyle Ashton and Rotimi Fani-Kayode is so interesting. They weren’t just exploring their Blackness, but their queerness: these images of men in tutus, leather, bras, half naked and contorted are powerful, private expressions of desire and identity, miles away from the mainstream.
But there are issues here. The works from before or after the ’80s (Wolfgang Tillmans, Roshini Kempadoo, Al-An Desouza, etc.) are jarring and out of place. And then you start noticing all the things that are missing: where’s punk, where’s goth, where’s acid house, where’s football culture, where’s the endless greed of new money and the explosion of avaricious city boys exploiting the nation? This isn’t a complete portrait of 1980s Britain – it’s not even a complete portrait of the people who spent the ’80s resisting, reacting, suffering – it’s exclusively the bits these curators think matter, but so much important stuff is missing.
It’s not even a proper survey of ’80s documentary or fine art photography either. So as a collection of images by a bunch of different photographers, it’s problematic and a bit of a mess, but as a singular vision of a specific approach to resistance and photography in 1980s Britain it just about works. This show has its ups and downs, but that’s what you’d expect from the decade that gave us both The Cure and Kajagoogoo.
