The 80s - Photographing Britain, Tate Britain review: a queasily nostalgic photography show

The myth of the Eighties as a combustible era of economic growth and social unrest was being framed even as the decade was beginning. Martin Parr’s subtly caustic views of Tory election parties and public school open days offer some of the show’s very few images of upper-middle-class people, and as so often with Parr’s brilliantly lit social tableaux there’s a sense of inverted snobbery that lacks real depth. The urge of young Black photographers to show their communities as they actually were, at a time when the notion of Black Britain was just coming into being, produced marvellously evocative and technically masterful imagery, from Vanley Burke’s documentation of sound systems in the Handsworth area of Birmingham to Mumtaz Karimjee’s work with the proud and political Asian women of Southall. But the images that feel most revealing of that time, and most connect it with ours, come in the last sections, which contain some of the most taboo-busting gay photography, starting with the wildly homoerotic imagery of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X. They’re a reminder that the Eighties weren’t only a time when it was fashionable to “come out” even if you were barely gay, but when British society as a whole came out on a kind of cosmic-existential level – when classic British reserve went out the window. open image in gallery Melanie Friend, ‘Greenham Common, 14 December 1985’ Finally, Jason Evans and Simon Foxton’s images from i-D magazine of young Black men posing dressed to the nines in suburban streets suggest that the decade’s aspirational glamour could be turned into a form of street-level resistance by anyone with a strong enough sense of personal style.