David Hoffman: ‘It was the riot that pushed Thatcher out’
This image is written in my bones somehow. There had been four quite vigorous poll tax marches before this one, and heavy clashes with police, so it seemed likely there would be trouble. But it wasn’t until I was walking up Whitehall when, for no reason, a riot policeman ran straight at me and hit me in the throat with his shield that I knew this would be rough. To my amazement I was OK and I’d kept the cameras out of the way also.
The crowds became packed, and it turned into a washing machine of people and police. The police were charging and people were throwing things – a scaffold clamp thrown from the roof of the grand buildings hit my leg, ripping a hole in my trousers and my shin. There’s often a spirit of joy at a protest. It’s a place where social pressures are released and restraints are removed – which is why some people behave so badly and do things that are out of character. It’s dangerous and beautiful.
I’d been taking photos of the burning buildings but they weren’t very interesting, then I saw Laurence and Nidge kissing. It needed to have the burning buildings behind them – I shot five or six frames quickly and moved on. Later Nidge’s solicitor used it to successfully throw out the police charge against him.
I do think that riot was the one that pushed Thatcher out. Pictures change and mean different things as the decades soak into them. But this photograph doesn’t say anything about the nature of the state, of how we relate to each other under those circumstances, about the underclass life Laurence and Nidge, who have both now passed away, were forced into. For me, it certainly brings back feelings of being young and fit and quick on my feet, as I sit here, aged 78.
It’s impossible to have that sort of demonstration now – one of real strength and energy. It’s a massive loss to society. Charlotte Jansen
Tom Wood: ‘Someone at the club wrote a song about me’
My wife and I moved to a flat above New Brighton Promenade, in Wallasey on Merseyside, in 1978. We met a guy called Fid, who often held parties at the Chelsea Reach, a nightclub further down the prom. At these parties you’d have to buy beer from the pub disco downstairs, where there’d be crowds of people and I’d think: “Wow, if I could photograph this!” But I was too shy.
Because of Fid, I was able to get into the Chelsea for free and was introduced to the manager, Paul Chase, who was always supportive. It was noisy, smoky, people were often very drunk and it could be difficult to explain what I was doing with my camera. But between 84 and 86, I was often there two or three nights a week, and gradually gained this unwritten consent.
It was really dark and details wouldn’t become apparent until my flash lit everything up. I shot in infrared for a while, so no one saw the flash, but it felt like cheating. I was forever being asked to take pictures, and would make prints to hand out. Years later, a singer-songwriter called Steve Roberts saw himself in one of the photographs at Tate Liverpool and wrote a song about it called Over Here Photie Man!
I’ve met so many people from these pictures at events and exhibition openings. Sometimes I learn that people I’ve photographed are no longer with us, and one of those is Vernon, who we see here with two sisters from Wallasey. Vernon was part of a group, of girls as well as boys, who would come across from Liverpool in a van on the Monday night, when it was free to get in. He and his friend Dave were in so many of my pictures I could have made a book just of them. As the picture suggests, he didn’t get lucky that night. Chris Broughton
Syd Shelton: ‘He was getting close to hitting me’
I found these two at a shop called The Last Resort, on the edge of Petticoat Lane. The sociologist Dick Hebdige was doing a piece about skinheads for New Socialist magazine and wanted me to take some photographs for it. I knew that’s where skins went to buy their gear. I’d already chosen the corrugated iron wall with all the crap underneath it, which I thought would make the perfect backdrop, and we were talking as we headed over there. As soon as the pair heard the word “socialist” they started to become quite combative.
I’m not the sort of photographer who pretends to be something different, and so as I was shooting we continued to argue and it got quite tense. Making what I call “real” portraits, these sort of studio photographs done outside, is extremely difficult. I’m looking for the point when a trust develops, even in hostile situations, and the person I’m photographing is no longer self-consciously setting up a pose. By the last couple of shots, the guy in the Crombie, Kevin, was starting to clench his fist. I knew he was getting close to hitting me, so I went, “Thanks very much,” and legged it as fast as I could.
Three or four years ago, I got an email from Lee Daly – the guy on the right in the Fred Perry shirt and braces. He described his younger self as “a victim of the insidious extreme rightwing propaganda of the times” and “a rebel without a clue”. Within two years, he’d become a highly politicised socialist and anti-apartheid activist, and had joined the Anti-Nazi League. I was astonished and flattered that he remembered that day as clearly as I did and had the courage to send me this incredible confessional message. He’s stayed in touch with Kevin, who’s now a cuddly grandad, according to Lee. CB
Brenda Prince: ‘I used my elbows to get to the front’
This photograph was taken during a march on parliament to repeal the anti-gay laws in 1992. I joined Format Photographers in 1983, the first all-women photographic agency, and this protest is something we would have covered. As usual, there were several of us there. As a lesbian and a feminist, I would have supported this protest anyway. I remember those demos were quite exciting – at that one, everyone lay down on Charing Cross Road, police everywhere, but at this point, everyone was on their feet. As a short woman – I’m 5ft 3 – I used my elbows to get to the front of the press pack. I recognised Derek Jarman immediately. It’s not a bad shot of him.
I came to photography through my politics. From the age of 18, I was very interested in documenting issues and challenging stereotypes. I didn’t like the way women’s bodies were used – and are still – selling things like cars: pictures of women sitting half-naked on car bonnets enraged me. At the beginning of my career, I naively thought my photographs might help to change the way people think about and look at women, and I do believe the images we produced at Format skewered the prevailing images of the time. When we’d get a request at Format for an image of an engineer or plumber, we’d send a picture of a woman engineer or plumber – we had plenty of those.
I hung up my cameras in my 50s and the agency closed in 2003. But we feel we’re being rediscovered now. Some of our photographers put their work into the Format archives, which are now housed at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. As women photographers, I do believe we have a different view of the world, and I hope we have contributed in a small way to changing attitudes. When Format started, most of the women had the experience of not being taken seriously and getting work. They were fed up with the assumption that all photographers were men. So, it was a great place to be. And in a way, Format Photographers itself was a form of protest. CJ
John Davies: ‘At the top, I found a homage to Duran Duran’
In the early 80s I became interested in the enormous role industry has played in shaping the British landscape. When I visited Rhymney, in south Wales, for the Valleys Project, I was looking at the remains of the coal-mining industry, which had been massive in Wales at the beginning of the century. I made this picture during the miners’ strike, when nearby Penallta colliery was one of only two working coal mines remaining in the area: it survived the strike, but closed in 1991. As well as striking miners, I photographed workers in the new industries that had sprung up in endless anonymous sheds like the ones you see here.
In order to map out the landscape and see its elements in context with one another, I would pursue high vantage points and I climbed this rock outcrop to photograph the valley beneath and the railway line that once moved the coal to Cardiff. The outcrop is about 20 metres high. On one side it’s a slope, on the other there’s a sheer drop.
When I reached the top I discovered this graffiti and was quite impressed – because it’s not an easy climb. I assume a young woman had carried a brush and a can of brilliant white gloss up there, and painted “Duran Duran” – in homage to the gods, like people inscribe a tree with a heart and the name of their lover. The name painted nearby suggests she was called Kate.
Duran Duran made spectacular videos at the time that had a visual impact, and this, too, seemed quite a statement in this relatively isolated place, hidden in an industrial area. If it wasn’t for the graffiti, I would just have made a picture of the view. Instead, I found this surprising conflict between the natural and the modern cultural life of the time. CB
Joy Gregory: ‘Back then, people of colour couldn’t be framed as beautiful’
I grew up in a world where people of colour were not represented in a positive way – definitely not in beauty or fashion magazines. Where they did appear, there had to be a back story of exoticism; they couldn’t just be, there had to be a reason to be a spectacle. You couldn’t be framed as beautiful – you didn’t belong in that world.
When I made Autoportrait I saw the images as acting out an aspect of myself, though I didn’t look like myself in real life. This idea of putting the Black body into that context of fashion and beauty became an obsession of mine for many years – I was obsessed with magazines. One of the greatest days of my life was going for an interview at Condé Nast, and being offered a job in their darkroom. But by the time I got home, they had withdrawn my offer. The men who worked in the darkroom were mortified at having a young girl working with them.
I had never thought of doing pictures of myself but people didn’t turn up to be models, so I ended up using myself. This was the first time I designed it as well. I didn’t think of myself as beautiful – no one that age does – but it was an opportunity to inhabit that space. I had Polaroids and one roll of 120 film. I was shooting on a Hasselblad, and I didn’t have much money at the time so I had to get it completely right.
The printing process was an important part of the work and a way to talk about skin hue. I used lith printing but I did it my own way: I worked with a weak solution of developer and processed it in the dark for 30 minutes – only at the last minute did I put the light on. The making of each print was very performative and dependent on chance, but also a lot of trying over and over again.
I think people were quite surprised by them when I first showed them. The only negative reaction was mine – I was mortified at being in the exhibition with all these giant pictures of my head on the wall, so I sat outside! But I don’t mind being in the room with them now. They’re not me, they’re someone else. CJ
Anna Fox: ‘They drank fizz then went out for breakfast’
We’re looking at a sales team from Rank Xerox having breakfast in 1988. They’re celebrating the end of the sales year, they’d had some champagne in the office and then piled down to the nearest cafe for breakfast. I’m sitting at the end of the table, probably having a bit of toast, with my medium-format camera and my portable flash. This guy was quite pushy and I was constantly half-arguing and joking with him. I could only get this kind of intimate shot because I had been hanging out with them for quite a period of time. When I gave him a copy of the image, he was very proud of it and put it on his desk.
This image was part of a commission, Work Stations, a study of life in 40 offices in London. It’s not a conventional documentary project in any respect – photographing offices then was seen as a banal thing to do, and there’s an overdramatic, fictional feel. The pictures look staged, but they’re not – though of course when there’s a photographer around, people are always performing to some extent.
Before I became a photographer, I worked in an office, for an insurance company. My whole family worked in offices. Offices were spaces I knew quite well, but this was an opportunity to look at things from an analytical distance. The changes in this period in Britain under Thatcher were massive. I was thinking about Thatcher’s catchphrase: “There is no such thing as society, only individuals.” I wanted to give a sense of what our society had become under someone like Thatcher, and the significance of work and the pursuit of individual wealth in Britain.
The pictures are slightly absurd and straightforward – it’s important to me that there’s humour and irony embedded in the work. In another image, a man looks at a woman’s legs from behind his giant, ship-like desk. The title of that is Headhunter. CJ
John Harris: ‘It was a case of escape or get clobbered’
This was taken early on in the miners’ strike at Lee Hall colliery in Staffordshire. It’s a picture that always gets attention because it’s so very atmospheric. I was really pushing the film and it’s right on the edge of what you could do technically then. Shooting at dawn, I could just about hold a 30th of a second at the widest aperture at 3200 ASA. There’s all the steam from the cooling towers of the power station connected to the coal mine and there’s another light source floodlighting from behind.
If you look on the left, you can see pickets were still being allowed to speak to workers going in and that stoical copper is also telling – this was taken just as the way the strike was being policed changed drastically, with pickets subsequently being prevented from talking to workers. The policing moved from a fairly conventional process to full military-style, with police convoys moving in, surrounding villages and attacking entire communities.
The battle of Orgreave was horrific but I remember even worse violence in the autumn of 1984. My medium is light and for much of the time there just wasn’t any. I’d have to get very close with a big Hammerhead flash gun, so a lot of pictures involved grabbing a shot and escaping before getting clobbered. I was quite fit in those days.
Thatcher’s demonisation of the miners as “the enemy within”, seriously upset them. They were angry about the way the strike was reported by the mainstream media and I was festooned with cameras, but over time I built up trust. It was important to be able to look people in the eye. CB
Paul Seawright: ‘A banal place can conjure Troubles horror’
The Sectarian Murder series came out of the distance that happened when I left Northern Ireland to go to West Surrey College of Art. When I chatted with people in England, they tended to think anybody who’d been killed in the Troubles was probably involved somehow, that they must have been a terrorist or soldier or a member of the security forces. But that wasn’t true – two-thirds of those killed were civilians.
I started using photography to interrogate my own history and where I’d come from, growing up in a Protestant working-class estate in Belfast. I pored through old newspapers in the library, looking for references to sectarian murders during my childhood in the early 1970s and noting how they were reported. Then I went to those places and made photographs.
Inevitably, the locations were quite banal – places just outside the boundaries of territory. I was interested in how you could photograph that nothingness and still conjure up the reality of the conflict and the horror of what happened to people without reverting to the kind of violent images that had dominated the papers. This photograph is just one of those areas, a scrap of Tarmac and a puddle. In 1972, a 16-year-old was shot here by one of two youths on a passing motorcycle.
To mimic a forensic style, I used a handheld flash, so the images do have this kind of eerie look about them. The photographs were exhibited with text from the original newspaper reports, but I removed any reference to the victims being Catholic or Protestant. I wanted to suck out that element of tit-for-tat scoring of which side was worse than the other in order to focus on the humanitarian aspect. People were killed for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. CB
Roy Mehta: ‘I’d get invited into people’s homes’
The 1980s were such an extraordinary time for photography in the UK; there was a sense that this was a medium that was developing fast. I had been working on projects around London but when I started to make work in Wembley and Brent, something seemed to make sense. I grew up in the wider borough, so it felt familiar, and I knew intuitively that this was an area that needed recognising.
As a photographer with an interest in documentary, I was responding to the area’s energy, dynamism and myriad migratory experiences that I instinctively felt drawn to, along with a community spirit that I wanted to explore further. To me, that is what London was about, and I felt it should be celebrated. When I grew up, being brown or black was often seen as exotic. I began to realise that there was a lack of representation of the ordinary, of everyday life, lived through diasporic identities – and much of my subsequent work has engaged with identity and belonging as a way of trying to interpret and understand ideas around difference.
I used to walk the streets and would often be invited into people’s homes, churches and private spaces. This photograph was made on one of those walks. I wandered in, had a chat, and made the image. I was just there in the moment. I was open with people and they with me. It was such a different time to make work, and I would often give people a print to thank them.
I did show a section of this work back in the early 90s, but the photographs lay in storage for 30 years, I never expected them to resurface. I love the way an image can escape its original tether and move through time to become something else. CJ
• The 80s: Photographing Britain is at Tate Britain, London, from 21 November to 5 May
