From activism and capitalism to club culture and subculture, a new exhibition offers a snapshot of 1980s Britain

The 1980s was a decade of great change. Right wing conservatism and free market economics dominated, technological advances included the birth of personal computers, compact discs and camcorders, and the first cases of AIDS were reported.

Set against a backdrop of race riots, strikes, mass unemployment and gentrification, a new show at Tate Britain explores one of the UK’s most colourful eras through the medium of photography. Bringing together nearly 350 images and archive materials, ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ explores how the medium became a tool for social representation, cultural celebration and artistic expression throughout this period.

The exhibition introduces Thatcher’s Britain through a series of images depicting some of the decade’s key political events, from the miners’ strikes and the protest camps at Greenham Common to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Photography recording a changing Britain and its widening disparities is also presented through Anna Fox’s images of corporate excess, Martin Parr’s colour-saturated depictions of everyday life, Markéta Luskačová and Don McCullin’s portraits of street life in London’s East End, and Chris Killip’s transient ‘sea-coalers’ in Northumberland.

Alongside these are powerful images that gave voice and visibility to underrepresented groups in society, including work depicting multicultural and queer communities, and the representation of women in photography. The 1980s was the era of Section 28, a law passed in 1988 by a Conservative government that stopped councils and schools ‘promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. In response, Sunil Gupta’s 1988 series ‘Pretended Family Relationships’ saw the Indian-born photographer create a series of colour portraits of interracial same-sex couples collaged with lines of poetry by Gupta’s then partner Stephen Dodd and fragments of imagery taken at political protests against Section 28.

The exhibition closes with a series of works that celebrate countercultural movements throughout the 1980s, such as Franklyn Rodgers’ energetic documentation of underground performances and club culture. The show also shines a spotlight on i-D magazine and its impact on a new generation of photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Jason Evans, who, with stylist Simon Foxton, pioneered a cutting-edge style of fashion photography, reflective of a new vision of Britain at the dawn of the 1990s.

The 80s: Photographing Britain is on show until 5 May at Tate Britain, London SW1, tate.org.uk