Thoughts on … 80s photography and the Turner Prize at Tate Britain

It is kind of lovely in a way to get to an age when all the things you grew up with are getting retrospectives, exhibitions, repackages, remakes and remodels, and I enjoyed this week The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain. It runs until May.

At the start it has a very strong focus on the social history of activism, with anti-racism demos, strikes, Greenham Common and studies of poverty and unemployment featuring heavily, and then veers away from things I might have recognised from the newspapers of the time into more conceptual art photography.

Alongside the photographs there are also lots of documentary evidence, like leaflets, magazines, booklets and so on, and naturally, if you’ve met me, I gravitated towards the hedonistic pictures from i-D magazine and the Face, and going “Oooooh look at that old bus/car/B&Q signage in the background” of some of the shots.

As is often the case, I ended up with the strong impression that, while I was undoubtedly a child of the 1970s and 1980s, I was just a little too young and far too straight to be having the best of it.

Anyway, if you are of a certain age – i.e. a bit older or a bit younger than me – you will certainly enjoy this.

[A treated detail of an Anna Fox photograph from the Tate Britain 80s photography exhibition]

Because I wanted to see this and Electric Dreams at Tate Modern before Xmas, I ended up stumping up for a membership, as it wasn’t a huge amount more than the two individual tickets, so after the 80s photos I took advantage of that and went to see the 2024 Turner Prize exhibition, unwittingly on the day before they announced the winner.

[Part of Delaine Le Bas’ Turner Prize installation]

I can see why Jasleen Kaur’s installation got the nod to win, but personally I was much more into the strange world of Delaine Le Bas, which was like being in a demented hall of mirrors and which I found intriguing and a bit unsettling too. It is on until February.

[Part of Delaine Le Bas’ Turner Prize installation]