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Variant issue 43 www.variant.org.uk [email protected] back to issue list |
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The Filth, and the Fury More than 60% of those charged in the 2011 London riots were reported to be under the age of twenty-four.1 This raises all too obvious questions about what society is offering young people in terms of educational and social support. In the midst of a double-dip recession (if indeed we ever left it), with government funding cuts affecting most areas of education, social and cultural provision, the political debates of the 1970s have a renewed prominence in Britain. Although media and political reactions to the riots in England sparked discussions about the underlying social and economic causes, it was the outpouring of rage in damage against property that warranted the greatest media attention. Among those angered by the riots we can include the broom wielding, riot clean-up gentrifiers who wanted to reclaim the “real London from those who are scum”.2 Evidently, many of these people relished wielding self-righteousness more than their brooms. Upping the mood of moral outrage still further was the e-petition demanding that looters, rioters, their flatmates and families3 lose their homes. Clearly the second part of New Labour’s sanctimonious mantra “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” never made an impression on this virtual constituency. Such backlash to the civil unrest calls to mind the cautionary remark of a Parisian train driver in 1995, quoted by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Following a terrorist attack on his train, the driver warned against any want to take revenge on the Algerian community. “‘They are’, he said, ‘simply people like us’.”4 Bourdieu elaborated on the driver’s point; “It is infinitely easier to take up a position of for or against an idea, a value, a person, an institution or a situation than it is to analyse what it truly is, in all its complexity.”5 The question has to be asked, had the mass of young people who rioted in London had a more ‘affirmative’ political message would they be viewed by UK politicians and media with the same esteem they profess to hold for the recent uprisings across the Middle East? Is it really merely a supposed lack of a clear political objective that has made the London and other riots so objectionable? After all, what could be clearer than ‘Not This!’, in all their multiple, overlapping contexts? Beatrix Campbell’s 1993 book Goliath, which looks at the 1991 and 1992 suburban riots in England, attests to their disavowal, thus: “These extravagant events were an enigma. They made worldwide news and yet they seemed to be powered by no particular protest, no just cause, no fantasy of the future. However, even in their political emptiness they were telling us something about what Britain had become; the message in the medium of riotous assemblies showed us how the authorities and the angry young men were communicating with each other.”6 Yet if such a reductive view contains some validity, then how, if at all, can this situation become otherwise? To make a more genuine start than the broom wielders and their draconian allies, I suggest we look first to the 1970s. What follows is a development of my graduate dissertation, which explores the changing face of photography in Britain in that period. By taking a retrospective look at the community photographers, their political successes and failures during the ’70s, I think we can begin to understand more about the situation we find ourselves in today, while acknowledging the political foreclosures that have happened since. The Rear View By the 1970s many photographers had grown tired of the continual demands of a competitive and commercially driven practice. The falsifying of truth and the empty stylisations of pseudo-realism, as well as the emphatic use of stereotypes – all predominantly for commercial gain – were becoming highly disputed. Some photographers were prepared to sacrifice financial gain for a more fulfilling, socially useful practice.7 The newly appointed photography department within the Arts Council of Great Britain, created in 1973, also meant that funding opportunities were much more readily available. As the Arts Council encouraged practice at a grass roots level, community orientated projects were set to benefit the most. This guarantee of funding from a recognised government body allowed established practitioners some emancipation from the highly commercialised work which had previously been one of the few avenues that offered most photographers any form of financial support. Although they weren’t necessarily making money, with government funding and a programme of in-house fund-raising events, projects could generate enough income to sustain themselves and for some they provided the only viable alternative to unemployment. “It was a time of idealism; those involved gave their time freely to a movement they thought exciting and important.”8 The majority of the practitioners involved with these new community projects were, perhaps obviously at the time9, politically and socially ‘left-leaning’. Continual reference to the work of the Mass Observation movement10, The Film and Photo League11, and Worker-Photography Movement12 in contemporary and subsequent journals and exhibitions outlined how important the early decades of the twentieth century were among many community photographers. The social documentary genre that had developed in the 1930s greatly influenced the work that was produced at this time. Many photographers adopted the paradigm of the worker-photographer, using photography to expose social issues relating to poverty, housing and education, and energised the working class to try wrest control of their own situation.13 Through collaborative workshops and events, a social network of groups formed that was open to everyone and anyone who had an interest in getting involved. Aided by the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, and the continued push for widespread race, gender and sexual equality, the belief that change could come from below was stronger than ever. An important hub in the UK in all of this was The Photography Workshop established by Jo Spence and Terry Dennett in 1974, which brought with it the promise of a more inclusive and freely accessible photographic practice, marking a renewed sense of the social purpose within the medium in Britain. Community photographers were proactive in their response to the issues of the time and wrote prolifically on the subjects of photography theory, education reform, and visual representation. Their work provided the basis for these expanded photographic debates and appeared as a challenge to a disinterested aestheticism within photography and in the arts more broadly. The surge of alternative press organisations also facilitated the publication of a great deal of this work and helped to establish a national network of community art based workshops. Since the early 1900s, socially and politically progressive organisations had maintained an organisational relationship with the printed press and self-publishing.14 Produced and distributed cheaply and easily, photography, in this context, was the fitting vehicle for dissemination of political ideas by and for the working class – for the communist groupings, it was essential the proletariat, as ‘the one revolutionary class’, be reached in order to advance the necessary political uprising.15 Leap forward more than half a century of political agitation – including achievements of women’s suffrage and the ‘end of Empire’ – during the 1970s marginalised groups continued to use ephemeral material to ensure widespread availability of their work and garner mass support for their causes. The start of the decade saw the publication of the first issue of Suburban Press, an anarchistic political magazine, and continued with influential ‘minority’ publications such as Spare Rib and Gay News. Publications like Camerawork, Ten:8, and Creative Camera helped showcase and disseminate the work that grew from community workshops. These publications also served as an important platform for discussion. The inclusion of reader views and responses facilitated debate amongst readers and contributors alike, and created an arena for full-blooded political discussions. In Camerawork, one reader’s criticism of Jo Spence’s leftist values and the “boring religion of Marxism” inspired Spence to write another full article in response.16 The publication of ‘The Unpolitical Photograph’ was a clear indication of the interaction between reader and editor and the shared belief in the importance of debate. It is interesting to also reflect that following the riots of 1981 – grown out of racial tension, police confrontation, and inner city deprivation17 – portraits of some of the rioters were printed in papers like the Daily Mail and The People but also in Camerawork and Ten:8. The latter magazines offered a rather different platform and viewpoint from which to understand the causes and the motives for the riots. Of course we can find similar discussions on the internet today but community photography was, very importantly, a way whereby people developed face-to-face relationships based on trust. Part of a broader political tradition of workers’ education18 and history-from-below movements, the intellectual roots of the community workshops can in part be traced back to Raphael Samuel, a socialist and lecturer at Ruskin College, Oxford, where in 1967 he embarked on a programme of history based workshops that were ‘open to all’. According to Samuel, the study and writing of history were reserved for specialist groups and those within the ranks of academic history. The premise of these workshops was to counteract this continued elitism and instil the idea that history belonged to everyone. It was Samuel’s belief that teaching and research had “become increasingly divided, and both divorced from wider or explicit social purposes”.19 By adopting the form of a workshop, a more collaborative process was nurtured in which debate, argument and exploration into the theoretical principals of the subject was encouraged rather than the simple acceptance of dominant arguments. It, too, had its own publication, History Workshop Journal, released in 1976, and like many of the other independent journals, was to act as a study aid and aimed for their readers to be both contributors and critics of the issues at hand.20 Much like the History Workshop, the more art-based workshops set out to encourage people to explore the issues of identity and representation within their own lives but through the use of photography. Through image making, archival research, and theoretical education in visual literacy, photographers felt they could engage people in gaining a fuller understanding of themselves, the communities in which they lived, and the problems within those spheres. Don Slater indicates the movement’s apparent success in an essay published in issue 20 of Camerawork: “Community photography was the outcome of a specific form of production and consumption which overruled the marketplace”.21 By encouraging ordinary people to occupy the role of professional photographer, they were showing that they were more than just consumers. The removal of the commercial middleman ensured a more accurate account of the situation by “keeping the least possible distance between those who produce and those who consume the images”22. The majority of these groups’ core interests were the issues that faced the socially and politically marginalised: The Hackney Flashers were feminist in theory, The Blackfriars Settlement were solely concerned with youth and education reform, and the major concerns of MINDA were with race and an increased focus on fascist organising in Britain, to name but a few. To maintain a unified presence, most worked under these monikers and very little work was accredited to individuals, thus inspiring a group congeniality and sense of belonging. These workshops, for and by marginalised, discriminated and working class groups, opened up a forum for debate and discussion on the principals of photography otherwise absent. They not only taught the practicalities of photography but explored a purpose for taking photographs within the context of their reception. Through subsequent discussions about their images, participants were encouraged to be reflective of themselves and their actions and were taught to recognise what was implicit in the images.23 By combining theory and practical work many people learned how to create work that encouraged them to see themselves outwith the confines of stereotypes. In keeping with the whole history of the socialist project of working class self-representation, by taking control of how they, themselves, were documented, they were also (in theory) able to influence how others viewed them. Such a critical politics of representation inspired sophisticated theoretical development, none more so than Jo Spence’s self reflexive project Beyond the Family Album. As she writes, “There is no way I could have understood fully the political implications of trying to represent other people (however well intentioned) if I had not first of all begun to explore how I had built a view of myself through people’s representation of me”.24 Spence acknowledged that her previous work had been produced within a fixed ideology that was not always in the best interests of many people, including those in her images. However, the benefits of what Spence tried to achieve far out weighed any reservations she may have had about the method. The Photography Workshop movement explored representation and endeavoured to inform young people, and others, how to understand themselves outwith media stereotypes and through the lens of ‘class conflict theory’ – drawing attention to power differentials in society, emphasising social, political and material inequalities – in the days before that sort of thinking was officially ditched by New Labour. In addition to the practical and theoretical teachings which workshops provided, most were able to offer a platform to exhibit the work produced, and this added a further incentive to be involved. As well as providing a platform for showing work, Andrew Dewdney, who was a founding member of The Cockpit Gallery, felt that exhibitions focused the participants and provided a legitimate avenue for audience development. It was his opinion that “the exhibition was a powerful medium for output”25. Rather than relying on external institutions for the space and funding to facilitate exhibitions, participants sought their own solution. Devised in this context by the Half Moon Gallery, the portable exhibition was quickly adopted by several community art groups. By providing a travel-friendly package that could easily be delivered by post, photography could be exhibited in a variety of locations ranging from community art centres and schools to foyers and corridors of offices and town halls. This form of exhibition gave many community photographers freedom outwith the constraints of the art establishments and patronage control and allowed their work to be seen by the people it was most relevant to. The nationwide demand for such exhibitions facilitated the establishment of several independent photography galleries during the 1970s: the Cockpit Gallery in Holborn, The Side Gallery in Newcastle, Stills Gallery in Edinburgh, to name but a few. And of course the rise in available gallery space also meant a rise in the chances to exhibit on a more wide spread basis. It was this collaborative nature of the workshops that was central to their success. Opportunities and Fault Lines Although in many ways the workshops were succeeding, internal conflicts about political standpoints and the direction in which these projects should progress were starting to create a fractious environment. The underlying principles that had shaped the activities of the Workshop movement had been, by their very nature, ‘left-leaning’ but more specifically towards the old Left(s) of the 1930s. Britain had changed dramatically since then and the nostalgia for the tenets of a traditional Left was becoming outmoded with rises in more white-collar and media based jobs. By 1974 less than half the population were employed in manual labour, compared to 75% in 1900.26 During the ’70s the changing nature of the British labour market continued to fuel cultural aspirations that had been fatefully implanted by the ethics of ‘the opportunity state’ and so the rise of upward mobility, in place of the rise of class equality, ensured the reduction of a socialist-orientated demographic and the destabilisation of the traditional (male) support base of a working class left politics. Within the space of hardly more than a decade, the working class traditions of employment and, indirectly, identity were all but extinguished. In addition to these fault lines, which were to have a decisive impact on the electoral strategies of the Labour Party to gain power at the expense of advancing socialism, the failures and crises of consciousness (as before and since) among the ‘Peace and Love’ generation of the 1960s saw the formation of a much more antagonistic and disenfranchised generation in the next decade. Massive cuts to education, mass unemployment and an increasing divide between old and young in the 1970s instilled a sense of animosity within the youth (in part, a continuation of struggle with patriarchal power) and a rising disillusionment towards all aspects of the parent and dominant cultures. The significance of youth responses to social and cultural events became a much researched area of study in the 1970s, not least with the rise of Cultural Studies, and helped to secure the importance of the education and race debates of the time. Adapting a more anarchistic attitudinal outlook, such as the rejection of electoral politics, many young people of Britain in the 1970s had their own ideas about social reform; ideas which would lead to the formation of the Punk phenomenon. Although the proliferation of Punk’s uttermost oppositionality was short-lived27, it still helped to spread more enduring facets of anarchistic thought. Rather than adopt mainstream political means to agitate for social reform, Punk promoted a ‘Do It Yourself’ ethos which inspired a whole generation of young and creative people to take matters into their own hands, and was the vehicle through which many became politicised. Although ‘purists’ despised Punk’s rise to the level of Zeitgeist by the end of the decade, some basic features of the movement remained, to be adopted and adapted by successive generations. Establishment reaction towards Punk, as with previous ‘moral panics’, helped to distinguish a clear British youth culture, one marked by a rising rejection of mainstream politics within the younger generation – a rejection which would go on to inspire, amongst others, the animal rights, rave, squat, anti-road, and climate change ‘social justice movements’. Jo Spence and Terry Dennett, from the Half Moon Photography Workshop collaboration, had always been concerned with the continued working through of a Left politics within their work, emphasising the importance of change from below. The edging out of both Spence and Dennett after only seven issues of Camerawork was an indicator that people were becoming wary of being thought of as out-of-date and wanted to inhabit a more populist space.28 Following these events, Camerawork began to adopt a different tack; they published their last serious article on community art in 1980 and underwent a physical change in format. It made a conscious effort to include work about more mainstream media culture and practitioners who were more concerned with a gallery audience. A similar fate awaited the original members of MINDA. What started as creative disagreements over the layout of their accompanying publication, Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF), soon became more deep-rooted political feuds, which resulted in the disbanding of the original organisation.29 An indispensable guide to the fault lines of the ‘opportunity state’ at this time is Dick Hebdige’s article ‘The Bottom Line on Planet One: Squaring Up to The Face’ (Ten:8, 1985), which explores the success of The Face magazine, first published in 1980. When asked why they didn’t read Ten:8, visual communications students at West Midlands College gave answers such as; “It’s not like The Face…It’s too political… It looks too heavy… It’s got the ratio of image to text wrong…I don’t like the layout…It depresses me…you never see it anywhere…It doesn’t relate to anything I know or anything I’m interested in…It’s too left wing… What use is it to someone like me?”30 Hebdige goes on to comment, “For them Ten:8 is the profane text – its subject matter dull, verbose and prolix; its tone earnest and teacherly; its contributors obsessed with arcane genealogies and inflated theoretical concerns”31 Epitomising the Thatcher era, The Face was a self-funded ‘street style’ magazine which encapsulated everything that Camerawork and Ten:8 were not; ‘a visual-orientated youth culture magazine’ whose circulation figures reflected its then market success (selling 88,000 copies a month). For whatever reason, it captured the imagination of what a significant enough number of young people with disposable income were looking for at that moment, and that, clearly, was not highly politicised wordy journals. The landslide victory of Thatcher in 1979 marked the symbolic demise of the Left in party politics, just as the publication of The Face in 1980 marked the demise of the politicised ‘history-from-below’ photography magazines that had driven and engaged debates of the 1970s. Both these ‘defeats’ signalled the decline of ‘the Left’ in enacting any successful mass alternative to neo-liberalism throughout the ’80s, and beyond. Despite their best intentions, it was clear that the community workshops were finding it increasingly difficult to connect with some of the people they were intended to support. The harshening conditions of mass unemployment, rising poverty and poor housing – many seeing housing estates fall to a standard well below the poverty line – coupled with sensationalist media reporting and exploitation by politicians, combined to produce a general perception of a rise in criminality. These increasingly degraded conditions, with community projects also suffering cuts, saw those most likely to contribute and benefit move further beyond reach.32 Society’s Child The final, and perhaps most significant, way in which workshop based practice began to falter was the increasing acceptance of photography into the contemporary fine art market by the end of the decade. By the 1980s, the arts and education were being more fully positioned as aspirant entrepreneurial enterprise, and a boom in the art market directed interest towards perceived profitable forms. The growing financial interest in photographic work meant that community arts, and its infrastructure, became increasingly marginalised as a practice. (Thatcher’s infamous “there is no such thing as society” statement being delivered in 1987.33) The success of the workshops was the more even playing field on which work was developed and presented; participants working and debating together with no apparent hierarchy, the seeming opposite of the competitive and increasingly marketised art school culture.34 Yet, whether by choice or by default, community photographers began to find their work being placed in contexts it was never intended for and which tended to distance the genre from the communities where it was created. The closing chapter of this period was the Three Perspectives exhibition that took place at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1979. Although it signified the growing influence that photography had within the art world, it also saw those involved relinquish their critical stance regarding the fine art establishment and marked the continued departure from more community orientated work. By 1985 the time of idealism had passed, as Hebdige points out, “with the public sector, education, the welfare state – all the big ‘safe’ institutions up against the wall, there’s nothing good or clever or heroic about going under. When all is said and done, why bother to think ‘deeply’ when you’re not paid to think ‘deeply’.”35 More recently, incidents like Cindy Sherman shooting for M.A.C makeup, the commissioning of Banksy graffiti for the Swiss embassy in London, the inclusion of King Mob propaganda in a Tate Britain exhibition in 200836, along with so many other examples, ‘cool capitalism’ has proven that even the most ardent expressions of cultural dissent can, eventually, be absorbed into the dominant culture they seemingly once fought against.37 Whatever the flaws of the community workshops at that time, or the political weaknesses in their wider networks of support, this generation of community photographers did take equality seriously. What is essential, now, is that we move against the real world positioning of working class youth as an underclass – or, the ‘forgotten ones’38. Instead, like the community workshop ethos, they need to be accepted as equals in what would be a more inclusive society. This is not an argument I can make here but if examples are needed of not doing so, we need look no further than the glorification of CHAV culture or the apotheosised reception of parody personas such as Vikki Polard, to start to understand some of the current problems facing the self-perception of young people. Moreover, to magnify the problem, as I pointed out at the outset, many of those charged with offences in the 2011 riots were, in fact, over the age of twenty-four (up to 40%) but the real establishment outrage was directed at youth. As Hebdige observed, “youth is present only when its presence is a problem or is regarded as a problem.”39 If there was ever a need for education towards positive self-representation of youth, one embedded in attaining structural equality across society, surely the time is now. Otherwise, one way to consider the perceived negative effects of increased low self-esteem – as an inextricable factor of structural inequality40 – is to, again, look at Beatrix Campbell’s not unproblematic and not unchallanged description of the (male) youth community in Blackbird Leys in 1991: “Economically they were spare; surplus; personally dependent on someone else; socially they were fugitives whose lawlessness kept them inside and yet outside of their own communities. They had no job, no incomes, no property, no cars, no responsibilities... What they did have was a reputation.”41 Society, as increasingly more fully incorporated into the operations of the market, has become more about individuals than community; more about supposed entrepreneurs than co-operatives. At the very least the workshops of the 1970s facilitated tangible artistic and creative development and opened up the hegemony of history writing to the working class – a ‘history from below’ increasingly willing to incorporate women, workers, and subalterns of various kinds as historical agents. The question remains, how do young people politically engage with a system that seeks and succeeds to disenfranchise them? As Simon Critchely notes in his 2008 text, Infinitely Demanding, “there is increased talk of a democratic deficit, a feeling of irrelevance of traditional electoral politics to the lives of citizens [...] where citizens experience the governmental norms that rule contemporary society as externally binding but not internally compelling.”42 Contrary to Hebdige’s notion, ‘cool’ was not the key. As someone who was a teenager in the mid-1990s, coupled with a distinct lack of general political teaching, the patronising displays of camaraderie between Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher et al were enough that I remained politically inactive until my late twenties – success?! Young people don’t want politicians to come ‘down’ to their level – a false generosity and litmus of the imbalance. They want to be respected enough to be allowed to engage their own decision making and make their own inquiry. The workshops of the 1970s may have been flawed, nonetheless, they did foster political ideals that strived to achieve a class-based history as part of an oppositional engagement – aiming to “attack vigorously those types of historical enquiries which reinforce the structures of power and inequality in our society”43. By embedding these ideals within photographic and educational practices they were able to encourage and enact a more socially conscious and collaborative way of working. As Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsmen, says, “the head and the hand are not simply separated intellectually but socially”.44 Notes 1 ‘UK riots: suspects, statistics and cases mapped and listed’, Conrad Quilty-Harper, Amy Willis, Martin Beckford and Edward Malnick, The Telegraph, 12 Aug 2011: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8698443/UK-riots-suspected-looters-statistics-and-court-cases.html 2 ‘A few quick clarifications on the recent riots’, A group, London, Libcom, 28 Aug 2011: http://libcom.org/forums/news/few-quick-clarifications-recent-riots-28082011 3 ‘Westminster vows to evict social tenants involved in riots’, Kate McCann, The Guardian, 10 August 2011: www.guardian.co.uk/housing-network/2011/aug/10/council-seeks-eviction-for-looters 4 Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘A Train Driver’s Remark’ in Acts of Resistance, Polity Press and The New Press, 1998, p.21 5 Ibib., p.22 6 This extract of Campbell’s (1993) book Goliath is in Jim McGuigan’s (1996) Culture and the Public Sphere, London: Routledge 7 Spence, Jo, ‘The Politics of Photography’, in Camerawork, no.1 (February 1976): pp.1-3 8 Hebdige, Dick, ‘Well Maybe’ 9 For a critique of the later, new Labour developments of engaging members of ‘excluded groups’ in historically privileged cultural arenas, see: ‘Beyond Social Inclusion: Towards Cultural Democracy’, The Cultural Policy Collective: 10 The Mass Observation movement started in the 1930s - the population was encouraged to keep a record of their lives and then submit transcripts to the movement’s editors for analysis and storage. The aim was to obtain an ‘intimate’ record of peoples’ day-to-day lives. Writers recorded conversations overheard on buses or in pubs, their views on current affairs or technological advances of the day, the food they ate, how they spent their Sunday afternoons and domestic issues. 11 The Workers Film and Photo League in the United States (known as the Film and Photo League after 1933) was part of an extensive cultural movement sponsored by the Communist International and its affiliated national parties in the interwar period. 12 Starting in Germany and the USSR - and spreading across Europe, and to the United States, central America and beyond - the movement promoted the depiction of proletarian working conditions and everyday life. Communist-affiliated groups of amateur worker-photographers were exhorted to lay bare, in a “hard and merciless light”, the iniquities and social ills of capitalism: “Photography has become an outstanding and indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary class struggle.” 13 W. Korner and J.Stuber, ‘Germany:Arbeiter - Fotografie’, trans. David Evans and Sylia Gohl in Photography/ Politics 1, p.73 14 See, for instance, Guy Aldred (1886-1963): www.gcu.ac.uk/radicalglasgow/chapters/aldred.html 15 Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Suffolk: Pimlico 2005, p.406 16 Spence, Jo, Cultural Snipings: The Art of Transgression, London: Routledge, 1995, p.37 17 See ‘1981 Brixton riot’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brixton_riot 18 See e.g. ‘The Working Class Self-Education Movement: The League of the Plebs’, Colin Waugh, Workers’ Liberty, 16 January 2009: www.workersliberty.org/story/2009/01/16/league-plebs 19 Editorial Collective, ‘Editorial’, History Workshop Journal, no. 1 Issue 1 (Spring 1976): http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/1.toc 20 ‘Making History: The Changing Face of the Profession in Britain’, Institute of Historical Research, University of London School of Advanced Studies, www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/HWJ.html 21 Slater, Don, ‘Community Photography’, Camerawork, no. 20 (Dec 1980) pp.9-10 22 ibid. 23 Andrew Dewdney, interviewed by Shirley Read Part 10 - 12, British Library Sound Archives (April 2000). http://sounds.bl.uk/SearchResults.aspx?query=Andrew%20Dewdney&category=All categories&publicdomainonly=false 24 Spence, Jo, Putting Myself in the Picture, Avon: Camden Press Ltd, 1986, p.83 25 Andrew Dewdney, interviewed by Shirley Read Part 10-12, British Library Sound Archives (April 2000). 26 Black, Jeremy, Modern British History since 1900, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000, p.125 27 With exceptions!, see e.g.: http://ianbone.wordpress.com/ 28 Spence and Dennett, ‘A Statment from Photography Workshop,’ in Photography/Politics 1, ii. 29 Minda, ‘Minda,’ in Photography/ Politics 1, p.139 30 Hebdige, Dick ‘The Bottom Line on Planet One: Squaring Up to The Face’, in Hebdige, Dick, Hiding in the Light, Routledge, London, 1988, p.156 31 ibib. 32 Pinnington, ‘Art in Action’ in Ten:8, no 20: 20 33 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women’s Own magazine, 31 October 1987: www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689 34 The Face publishing a ‘Shock report’ on Thatcher’s art school budget cuts. 35 Hebdige, Dick ‘The Bottom Line on Planet One: Squaring Up to The Face’, in Hebdige, Dick, Hiding in the Light, Routledge, London, 1988, p.166 36 An archive of King Mob’s printed materials was acquired by Tate Britain, and several anti-art collage works by the King Mob collective included in the Tate Britain’s Collage Montage Assemblage exhibit in July 2008. 37 See McGuigan, Jim, Cool Capitalism, London: Pluto, 2010 38 In a society where currently you must be over 35 to be fully eligible for Housing Benefit; where under 25s are bracketed for a lower level of living ‘allowance’ Benefits; where the much lower minimum wage for under-21s is alone frozen; where if you’re under 18 you’re likely not entitled to Jobseeker’s Allowance; yet the age of full criminal responsibility is between 10 to 12 years. As we see from proposals to further increase the age of retirement, ‘youth’ is a flexible, arbitrary, benchmark according to who’s counting and for what purposes. 39 Hebdige, Dick, ‘Youth surveillance and display’, in Hiding in the light: On images and things (chapter 1), London: Routledge, 1988 40 “As Nancy Fraser has argued, cultural domination, non-recognition and disrespect invariably involve economic and political inequities.” See: Fraser, Nancy, ‘Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 15, cited in ‘Beyond Social Inclusion: Towards Cultural Democracy’, Cultural Policy Collective: www.variant.org.uk/20texts/CultDemo.txt 41 Campbell, Beatrix, Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places, Michigan, US, Methuen, 1993, p.29 42 Critchley, Simon, Infinitely Demanding, Pennsylvania, U.S.A, Merso, 2008, p.7 43 History Workshop Journal: www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/HWJ.html 44 Sennett, Richard, The Craftsmen, London, Penguin Books, 2008, p.45 |