I was commissioned to write this a few years ago for the Central European House of Photography in Bratislava (and thank you to all the photographers who contributed work). The book, which was great but expensive and very expansive, is now out of print so I am putting this up here. The brief limited me to 25 photographers , but there could have been so, so many more.
The History of European Photography
British Photography 1970-2000
The 1960s in Britain are remembered for the music, the
fashion, the World Cup winning England team of 1966 and all of the other
clichés the swinging Sixties can muster. It was a decade of political change
and increased social mobility; university education was opened up to working
class students, and working class voices were being seen, heard, and read in
film, literature and journalism. Socially, there was liberalisation of laws on
homosexuality, abortion and there was a sense of possibility and egalitarianism
in the air. Class no longer mattered quite as much as it had and we were in the
midst of what Harold Wilson called ‘The White Heat of a Technological
Revolution’.
Photographically the breaking down of class barriers was
made evident through the fashion work of Bailey, Duffy and Donovan while
overseas Philip Jones Griffiths, Don McCullin and Larry Burrows were producing
some of the most powerful photojournalistic images of the Vietnam War.
New music, new fashion, new wars. The mythology of the
sixties would have us believe it was quite a party. And then the party ended.
The Beatles broke up in 1970, British sporting glory became a thing of the past,
and armed conflict came to Britain’s street with the rise of the Troubles in
Northern Ireland and beyond, while in photography, and Tony Ray-Jones, British
documentary’s brightest star, died of leukaemia at the age of 31. The Seventies
had arrived, the party had ended, and Britain was suffering from a massive
hangover.
That’s the myth anyway and much of British photography of
the 1970s examines how this hangover manifested itself in Britain’s rundown
urban centres. It should be remembered, however, that the high notes of the 1960s
were isolated to urban areas. In some parts of Britain, life went on like it was
still the 1950s. This was especially true of the British countryside. As well
as making portraits of writers and artists, Fay Godwin also became known for her lyrical black and white
landscape photography with images that layered the past and present and added a
dark edge that undermined the pastoral clichés of the British landscape.
Access to the land and walking were key concerns of Godwin,
and these elements were also to the fore in the work of Hamish Fulton. Fulton (who studied with Richard Long, another
walking-centred artist) used photography and text to symbolise the emotional,
physical and geographic aspects of the journeys and landscapes he had
encountered on walks across mountain ranges, rivers and roads.
In urban Britain, many things hadn’t changed either. The
industrial cities of northern England were still marked by bombsites, the
aftermath of German bombing that still hadn’t been entirely cleared in the
decades following the end of the Second World War. And where it had been
cleared and new housing built, this new construction was often not much better
than the dereliction which had preceded it. One of the huge social experiments
of the 1960s was the clearance of inner city slum housing. In its place, shiny
new tower blocks were erected. When these new flats were well-designed, the
improvement in housing standards was welcomed. However, often build quality was
low, and few thoughts were given to infrastructure or the social networks that
were destroyed in the move from low-rise to high-rise.
Documentary
The transition from these old forms of housing to the new
forms of housing became a happy hunting ground for photographers, with
Finish-born photographer Sirkka-Liisa
Konttinen leading the way. Her long-term documentation of Byker Grove in
Newcastle, showed the wealth of working class life and culture in the decaying
terraced housing of the area before these neighbourhoods were redeveloped and
much of that culture was lost. Byker Grove is shot in grimy black and white and
captures a neighbourhood that is filled with emotion and energy.
Another photographer finding fertile photographic ground in
British inner cities was Daniel Meadows.
Meadows, who studied at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1970s with Martin Parr and Brian Griffin, was part of the New British Photography at the
beginning of that decade. Inspired by the work of Benjamin Stone (a British
photographer who photographed English life at the turn of the century 20th
century), the photographers of the New Documents and New Topographics exhibitions,
and the editorship of Bill Jay at Creative Camera, this group of photographers
began to search for what Britishness meant and in particular how ‘the ordinary’
could be portrayed.
For Meadows, this
search was focussed on northern England and had a collaborative approach. Based
in Moss Side, Manchester, his Free Studio in Greame Street was a community
project in which the privately educated Meadows put himself on an equal footing
to the working class people he photographed.
This integration with the community was reprised in Meadows
Free Photographic Omnibus project, in which he photographed England while
travelling on a double-decker bus which acted as bedroom, darkroom and means of
transport.
Meadows was working in the areas that were suffering most at
a time of economic decline in the mid-1970s. The nation was plagued with
industrial turmoil, annual inflation was nearing 30% and the initial euphoria
of 1960s equal rights legislation was transformed into the harsh struggle of
enacting change at an institutional and daily level.
One of many groups taking part in this struggle using
photography was Hackney Flashers.
This London-based collective worked on themes of equality in work, pay and the
provision of free childcare. Heavily influenced by the collages of John
Heartfield amongst others, their Who’s Holding the Baby exhibition in 1974
featured collages that questioned the provision of childcare and also featured
photographs from a local nursery.
One of the members of the collective, Jo Spence also developed her own work in response to how women,
family and the self were represented in society. Spence is one of the most
influential and political of photographers working during this time. Her
project and book, Beyond the Family Album, is an examination of what is and is
not represented in traditional family albums. For this project, Spence
reclaimed herself by taking control of her self-image and reinventing how she
was represented in her remade family album.
In 1982, Spence was diagnosed with breast cancer which
eventually claimed her life in 1992. Her subsequent experiences of medical
treatment informed her later work, particularly in Phototherapy, a project
which was a continuation of her investigations into how photography and therapy
could be combined to visually reconfigure the self.
Jo Spence began working with the Hackney Flashers in 1975.
The same year, just a few miles away from the Flashers’ Hackney base, Brian Griffin began working for the
staid sounding magazine, Management Today. But though Management Today sounded
staid, the photography Griffin produced for it was anything but. Instead of the
usual office and desk shots, Griffin put his subjects through their posing
paces in shoots that mixed the surreal, the odd and the downright embarrassing.
Griffin’s was a visual language that was quite unique, infused with a sense of
visual experimentation that extended into his advertising, music and portrait
work.
Other photographers extending creative boundaries in the
1970s were Garry Fabian Miller and Peter Mitchell. Fabian Miller began his
experimentations with colour in his adverts for the Milk Marketing Board, a
path that would lead him to his influential cameraless photography and experiments
with light in the 1980s and beyond, while Peter
Mitchell’s colour images of the decaying industrial and residential architecture
in the city of Leeds were signs of a radically different voice that found full
expression in his ‘A New Refutation of
the Viking 4 Space Mission’ show at Impressions Gallery in York in 1979.
Though Mitchell’s work did not have a huge national profile, it had a major
impact on key photographers who would bring colour to the foreground in the
1980s and 1990s.
Chris Killip’s
work in and around the Northumberland coastline was also made in the late 1970s
and the 1980s. At the same time Killip helped in the foundation of the Side
Gallery (as did Sirka Liisa Konttinen, whose
community-centred documentary exemplified both the work of the gallery and the
Amber Collective – which the gallery was attached to).
Killip’s dynamic
large-format photographs of the Northeast were shown in an exhibition and
published in a book called In Flagrante, work
that remains some of the greatest British documentary photography work ever
made. In Flagrante shows people and
communities that, despite being on the economic margins of society, retain an
energy and humanity that has depth and emotion in equal measure. His later
series Seacoal focussed on a
community that collected coal from the sea, and was subsequently made into both
a film and a book.
Changing Ethnicity
In the 1970s and 1980s, the ethnic make-up of Britain was
continuing to transform the face of the nation’s inner cities. In the 1950s and
1960s, large numbers of migrants from the West Indies, Bangladesh and India
arrived in the UK, settling in neighbourhoods and towns across the country.
Many settled in former mill towns in Lancashire and
Yorkshire, with Bradford being a favoured destination for many Pakistani (and
Bangladeshi) immigrants. For these newly arrived migrants, photography was a
way of validating their presence in their new homeland, a way of proving to the
folks back home that all was well and good.
The Belle Vue Studio in Bradford was one of many studios
that catered to this need. The Belle Vue Archive (rescued from a rubbish skip
by local photographer Tim Smyth) shows images of recently arrived Bangladeshis
and Pakistanis posing with the symbols of their new lives in this mill town in
Yorkshire.
In Birmingham, Vanley
Burke was creating a more expansive archive of black British experience
that included photography, music and art dating back to the1940s and first
major post-war West Indian migration that was marked by the arrival from
Jamaica of HMS Windrush in London in 1948.
His pictures also show the intensely political nature of the
late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when industrial decline, the election of
Margaret Thatcher, the rise of racism, and discriminatory police laws resulted
in a series of riots across urban centres in the UK, including around Burke’s home in Handsworth in
Birmingham.
Burke’s picture
of demonstators standing outside Digbeth City Hall illustrate the rise of punk
in the 1970s and the political alliances formed between anti-fascist groups and
the musical subcultures that emerged from the chaos of punk.
In the late 1970s the rise of punk led to a huge interest in
both the music press (with NME and Sounds leading the way) and the rises of
small, roughly designed fanzines that had high energy and low production values.
Photography played a huge part in defining the era and had influence that
reached a huge audience outside the relatively small circles of documentary and
art photography. Anton Corbijn’s
moody pictures of Joy Division walking over Manchester’s Princess Parkway and
posing in subways exemplified the angst-ridden dynamic of the end of the 1970s,
an energy that was reprised when Corbijn
moved into film-making and made Closer, a film that documented the rise of the
band and the eventual suicide of Joy Division’s lead singer, Ian Curtis.
Another photographer who made the move from music into more
lucrative areas was Chalkie Davies.
His iconic album cover for the Two-Tone label showing the Specials isolated
against a white background became a signature that was used when he moved to
Apple in the late 1980s. Here he became a pioneer in high-end digital imaging
and his still-lifes (which were made in incredibly complex studio settings) have
helped define the visual branding of Apple products to the present day.
Music
In fashion the most influential photographer to make the
move from music and subcultures was Nick
Knight. In 1982, while in his second year at university, he made Skinheads,
a book that looked at skinhead subculture. In addition to images, he also
included notes on fashion and music with a discography adding to a book that
extended beyond photography.
Knight became
Britain’s most innovative fashion photographer, and was part of a burgeoning
fashion scene that, influenced by post-punk music world and the London-centric
affluence of the 1980s, was taking the body-centred fashion photography of the
1970s into new directions that would eventually extend into online publishing
and film.
The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, coupled with a
deregulation in finance and in the mid-1980s led to a new wave of affluence in
the south of England. It also provided fertile ground for the emergence of more
mainstream youth-centred magazines with higher production values than the
homemade fanzines of the punk era. The most influential of these magazines were
I-d and the Face, both of which launched in 1980. Knight started his career at
I-d, a publication for which German-born photographers, Juergen Teller and Wolfgang
Tilmanns also photographed.
Both these photographers formed their careers in the UK
using a relaxed, vernacular style that extends across both their professional
and personal work. Teller’s book of
wannabe models, Come See, remains a
classic photobook with its rather sad portraits of aspiring models capturing
the downside of an industry that packages an idea of glamour that is more
imagined than real, while Tilmann’s
reflections on the everyday, and his openness to use more relaxed photographic
aesthetics in exhibiting his work, helped extend his influence into the art
world when he won Britain’s premier art prize, The Turner Prize, in 2000.
The lightness of Tilmann’s work is also apparent in that of Elaine Constantine, a photographer
whose snapshot approach moved fashion into a lighter, more upbeat world. Constantine
centred her aesthetic around young women having fun, with laughter and energy
prevalent in a blend that broke across generic lines, with elements of
documentary combining with fashion and lifestyle imagery.
Corinne Day also
used the idea of freshness when she photographed a 14-year old Kate Moss on
Camber Sands in 1990. This shoot took place in 1990, a time when youth culture
(fuelled by ecstasy and a flood of dance music) was becoming a place of
democratic hedonism. Day helped launch Moss’s modelling career, but Day also
became known for her darker fashion work, where waif-like models and what were
regarded as hard drug references helped give rise to the heroin chic label, a label that entered the mainstream when it was
namechecked by Bill Clinton in 1997.
Day also had a diaristic, daily-life centred approach to
photography, an approach that was increasingly shared in other areas of the
photographic world in the 1990s. Perhaps most notable of these works, and the
most diaristic is Anna Fox’s
Cockroach Diaries. This tells the story of living in a shared London flat
through the unique narrative device of the cockroaches that Fox encountered in
the living room, bedroom and Kitchen of the apartment. Other projects of Fox in
include Work Stations, a text-image series that captured the absurdities of
British office life.
More diaristic apartment living comes in Richard Billingham’s incredible Ray’s a Laugh series. This series of snapshots (originally made to
be references for an art project) show Billingham’s parents at home in their
cramped Birmingham flat. Ray (Billingham’s father) is an alcoholic, while his
mother struggles to keep the family under control. It’s a one-off series that
has affection, chaos, violence and sadness in equally measure.
The acceptance of Richard Billingham’s rough-edged colour
work in the art world was due in large part to the wave of British colour
photography that transformed the British photography landscape in the 1980s.
The photographer who used colour documentary in a more
experimental way that linked to art and film was Paul Graham. His early projects were quite straightforward; Beyond Caring used a sparse visual
language that showed the interiors of British unemployment offices, while Troubled Land showed Northern Ireland
through landscapes marked with traces of the armed conflict and military
presence that blighted the province from the 1970s to the end of the
millennium.
Graham extended his viewpoint to photograph in Europe and
then the United States where his American Trilogy series experimented with
ideas of montage, narrative flow and the use of tonality to convey meaning in a
way that was both ground-breaking and highly influential.
Most renowned, and infamous, of the new colour photographers
was Martin Parr. He sprang to
photographic fame through his book The Last Resort. This gave an unheroic view
of life (and particularly childhood) in the northern seaside resort of New
Brighton. It was work that divided traditionalists (including Henri
Cartier-Bresson who famously described Parr as being from a “completely
different planet”) both due its colour content and due to the fact that the
southern, middle-class Parr presented the working-class Wirral resort in such
direct and uncompromising fashion. It was work that showed a working class
that, thanks to the rule of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives, was on the
edge of terminal decline.
Parr perfected his ring-flash, synthetic colour technique
through work that focussed on the throwaway symbols of British culture, the
vagaries of mass tourism and the use of the vernacular image in global visual
culture. As well as making doing editorial,
advertising and film work, Parr was also a champion of the Photobook, and was
responsible for its rise to popularity through the Photobook Histories he
subsequently co-authored with Gerry Badger
Just up the road from New Brighton, another photographer was
also hard at work capturing the edges of working class Wirral life. This was Tom Wood. His long-term, almost
obsessive documentation of the communities of Merseyside amounts to one of the
greatest British photography projects undertaken, with images that are
touching, soulful and raw at the same time.
Landscape
The experimentation with colour in documentary helped create
a more open atmosphere in other genres of photography, including landscape. As a
photographer who uses cameraless photography to make large-scale prints of
ponds, river and the sea Susan Derges
is a prime example of this. Derges’ work has an autobiographical nature to it
that connects the artist to the land in which she lives, in particular the area
around her Dartmoor studio in the southwest of England.
Another photographer who worked in the Southwest of England
is Jem Southam. His classically
composed large format images of the ponds, rivers, estuaries and rockfalls of
the Dorset and Devon coasts combine a practice built on walking with a gentle
narrative flow in which geology, climate, seasonal change and human intervention
combine.
Landscape was also the focus of John Davies’ immaculate large format photographs, but his work
centred on the industrialised fringes of northern Britain and Wales. Often
mixing the urban, the industrial and the rural, Davies used a sober topographical
approach to landscape in which the connected and crowded nature of Britain is
apparent, creating images that are both grandiose, familiar and thoroughly
familiar.
At the end of the 1990s, Mark Power was working on projects that added a mapping element to
British landscape work, an approach that extended the autobiographical and
psychogeographical and walking-centred work of Jem Southam, Susan Derges and
Richard Long. The Shipping Forecast
was a project where images were made according to the areas named in the
Shipping Forecast radio weather reports, while 26 Different Endings was a project based on the London A-Z street
map. In this project, Power mapped the edges of London as marked by the A-Z and
recorded the self-referencing power of maps to make or break a place in terms
of geographical identity.
The 1990s ended in a period of optimism. The election of
Tony Blair and the New Labour government in 1997 led to an era of widening
opportunities. Full employment, investment in education, easy credit and
accessible housing created a millennial Britain that was throbbing with
optimism.
Yet at the same time, unsustainable privatisation, political
corruption, and a subservience to the financial sector combined with Blair’s
own messiah complex were beginning to infect British society. The millennium
ended on a high note, but with 911, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
disastrous financial crashes of 2007 all on the horizon, the good times were
not about to last.
