The sign just inside the entrance is quite simple – it points left and says: “The 80s”. It’s as though I’m about to enter a time machine and step back into a decade which, to me, feels like yesterday and also a lifetime ago. I’m at Tate Britain to see an exhibition called “The 80s: Photographing Britain” which sets out to explore “the work of a diverse community of photographers, collectives and publications – creating radical responses to the turbulent Thatcher years”.
I’m the right age to be drawn to this show: I lived through these years and witnessed these historic events first hand. I always feel that I’m a product of the Seventies – the decade in which I lived my teens. My musical and cinematic tastes, along with my political and social allegiances, were formed then, and I carried them with me through the Eighties. Like many others of my generation, it meant we often felt out of step with that decade, protesting against its norms, its politics, its ideals.
So it feels right to me that this exhibition begins in the late Seventies. The very first room is entirely in black and white – both visually and ideologically. We see images of the Grunwick dispute, anti-racist marches, riots in Handsworth. We are then led through the miners’ strike, Greenham Common and the Aids crisis. It’s a lot to be hit with all at once, and I feel a sense of relief moving into the next room to find, as in The Wizard of Oz, a world that has turned into colour.
There is a distinct change of mood – represented in works by Martin Parr and Tom Wood – as we see more images of people enjoying themselves. I start to think about how the black and white images seemed more overtly “political”, but how they also sometimes idealised and sanctified the people they were depicting – the endlessly suffering oppressed, picking coal from a beach, shivering by a gas fire, cowering from a copper.
In contrast, the colour photos show people who are perhaps no less financially deprived, but nonetheless having fun – snogging on the dancefloor, or sunbathing on a jetty, or buying an ice cream while smoking a fag and wearing white stilettos. These pictures make me smile, I like their attitude and humour. I like the people in them, who seem real and alive.
The exhibition is not a record of the important and powerful, or the celebrities of the period, and so there is very little in the way of bands or gigs or the cultural icons who spring to mind when we think of the Eighties. But I loved the changing fashions documented in clothes worn by actual people.
Early on there are some images of skinheads. I lean in close to see that one of them is wearing a Rock Against Racism badge. I remember that we used to look for those kinds of details in order to distinguish whether they were “nice” skinheads or “nasty” skinheads. This one I would have classified as a “nice” skinhead. He’s very good-looking. Ben notices me gazing at the photo.
“You’d have fancied him back then, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh God, yeah,” I say wistfully, and glance round at Ben, who is wearing an olive green MA-1 bomber jacket, turned-up jeans, and heavy black boots. I note my own predictability, and move on to the next picture.
It is one I’ve seen before, and as I look at it I think, “Hang on, I’m IN this photograph!” Taken in 1978 at Victoria Park in London, it shows Paul Simonon from the Clash on stage facing a huge crowd, at the culmination of an Anti-Nazi League march. I’d been on the march and I was in that crowd, though too far from the front of the stage to be visible in this picture. Even so, Ben and I stand for a while scanning the tiny faces as if searching through a Where’s Wally? montage.
“Where ARE you?” I think, as I look longingly for my 16-year-old face, my 16-year-old self. “Where on Earth ARE you?”
[See also: Rewriting the story of Gisèle Pelicot]
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This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex