Reflections on “The 80s: Photographing Britain” at Tate Britain

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

 

After months of meaning to visit Tate Britain’s exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain, I finally caught it on its closing weekend. From the promotional material, I had assumed the show would centre Black British photographers and Black subjects, foregrounding the work of artists I admire and others I had not yet encountered. That promise of space and reverence for Black photography was what drew me in. So when I arrived and found something quite different, I was surprised—and, to be honest, a little disappointed.

The exhibition turned out to be a broader survey of British photographic practices of the 1980s, though its actual time frame spanned from 1976 to 1993. I understand that decades are more porous than we often treat them. A decade does not begin with a cultural big bang and end with a clean rupture; the residue of one era bleeds into the next. Still, what does it mean for an exhibition to claim this particular decade? The decision to anchor the show in “the 1980s” while featuring work beyond its boundaries raised questions about curatorial framing and intent.

The Narrative of the 1980s

The exhibition seemed to revolve around the rise and fall of Thatcherism and its wide-reaching social, political, and economic effects. The first room featured images of protests, riots, the National Front, miners’ strikes, LGBTQ+ demonstrations, and the AIDS crisis. These photographs captured the heat of resistance, surveillance, and community under pressure. Other rooms interrogated class, nationalism, and race, including photographs of Margaret Thatcher herself.

However, as I moved through the galleries, the curatorial throughline began to feel muddled. The show promised coherence through the idea that photographers of the period were “reconsidering the possibilities of the medium and its role in society.” Yet this premise did not fully reckon with how many of the Black photographers included were not just reconsidering photography, but actively transforming it. 

Artists like Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ingrid Pollard, Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, and Maxine Walker were all present. Their works offered powerful interventions: reframing the gaze, challenging colonial legacies, and asserting Black subjectivity. Yet the exhibition did not commit to the conceptual or political frameworks that made their practices radical. Their images sat beside those of white contemporaries who were neither disruptive in the same way, nor required to fight for institutional space in the same way. 

While the exhibition mentioned the Black Arts Movement, the deeper politics of Black visibility—and the labour of making oneself visible—remained unaddressed and under-articulated.

Black Time and Displacement

I left the exhibition feeling that, while Blackness had been accommodated, it remained structurally out of place. It was unanchored from the dominant narrative of the decade being interrogated. It seemed to occupy a different space and—crucially—a different temporality. 

Black time, as theorised by Christina Sharpe (2016), is a lived temporality shaped by the afterlives of slavery, structural abandonment, and resistance. Black life, she writes, exists “in the wake,” always entangled with histories that refuse to be past. From this perspective, Black experience does not align neatly with dominant periodisations. The 1980s, as framed by the exhibition, could not fully hold the temporal registers through which Black communities lived, resisted, and created. 

This is not simply a matter of inclusion, it is a matter of temporal dissonance. To fold Black photographic practices into a broader narrative without reckoning with the specific historical conditions under which they emerged is to flatten their meaning. The exhibition’s attempt to be expansive ultimately felt disjointed—unable to sustain the multiple chronologies it had brought into play.

A Missed Opportunity?

There were moments of real splendour. The work of Fani-Kayode, sensuous, defiant, and intimate was rich and magnetic. Walker’s quiet rigour and quotidian beauty, Pollard’s collaged interventions, and Burke’s images of community and power all resonated with depth. These images did not simply capture, they disrupted. They unsettled the gaze, restructured the frame, and demanded a different kind of attention. 

They deserved more than to be slotted into a loosely coherent narrative. They needed a curatorial framework capable of holding them politically, conceptually, and formally. One that could honour not only their content, but their context, their urgency, and the worlds they imagine.

Some of these works can be viewed on Get Perspectives’ Instagram page. The Black Looks Project places Black art in dialogue with itself and with Black spectators, honouring not only the artwork but also the conditions of its viewing. It offers a curatorial frame that takes seriously the political resonance, joy, and world-building power of these images. 

In the end, The 80s: Photographing Britain left me wondering what the exhibition could have been had it truly centred Blackness, not just as content, but as method, framework, and form. What would it look like for an exhibition to reflect the multiplicity of Black life, not only by including Black artists, but by restructuring its very lens? 

What might it mean to stage an exhibition that does not simply document the 1980s, but asks how Black artists reimagined that decade? That interrogates not only Thatcher’s Britain, but Black futurities and refusals? That holds space for the joy, grief, tenderness, and radical imagination carried in these photographs? 

This exhibition offered glimpses of those possibilities—but also the fragmentation that results when Black time is asked to fit someone else’s clock.