It's grit over gloss in photo show's eye on the Eighties

Protest, poverty and privilege - The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain offers an exciting, if partial, view of a decade that remains highly polarising, writes Mark Hudson

- Mark Hudson

The myth of the Eighties as a combustible era of economic growth and social unrest was being framed even as the decade was beginning. In one direction you had Thatcher, yuppies, boom and bust, the dawn of the digital; in the other, epic strikes, inner-city riots and unprecedented activism across feminism, gay and civil rights. This exuberant exhibition on artists’ photographic responses to that still polarising decade focuses almost exclusively on the gritty, oppositional Eighties. Through most of the 11 densely-packed rooms you’d barely be aware that the glossy, aspirational Eighties were even taking place. It makes for an often exciting – but very partial – view of the time.

Fascists and lefties were battling it out on the streets of the East End, while the brutally abrupt shift from manufacturing to service industries created worse poverty and unemployment than the supposedly grim Seventies. This meant that the early Eighties in particular gave a weird sense of a society being thrown into an unknown technocratic future while harking back to the social polarisation of the interwar Depression years. It’s something made very apparent in the exhibition’s first room, which positively explodes with vivid images of the great street battles of the time: the miners’ strike of 1984-5, the Anti-Nazi League, Brixton riots, Grunwick picket, the HIV and Section 28 protests.