“The Tate is so woke at the moment, they probably plumped for that more hardline, left-wing agenda of Ten.8 and Camerawork [magazines],” says the UK photographer Martin Parr about the inclusion of the photography publications in Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain.
It is a reminder that the 1980s was a time of highly contested opinion, and a challenge to anyone who tries to catalogue the many strands of emergent photographic practices in that formative decade. The 1980s were all about “upending narratives”, says the co-curator Jasmine Chohan. [...]
The show will bring together work by more than 70 individuals and collectives, including conceptual images by Victor Burgin, a key theorist of the era, alongside those looking to represent their own communities, such as Roy Mehta and Vanley Burke.
