The Filth, and the Fury
Kat Gollock
More than 60% of those charged in the 2011 London riots were reportedto be under the age of twenty-four.1 This raises all tooobvious questions about what society is offering young people in termsof educational and social support. In the midst of a double-diprecession (if indeed we ever left it), with government funding cutsaffecting most areas of education, social and cultural provision, thepolitical debates of the 1970s have a renewed prominence in Britain.
Although media and political reactions to the riots in England sparkeddiscussions about the underlying social and economic causes, it wasthe outpouring of rage in damage against property that warranted thegreatest media attention. Among those angered by the riots we caninclude the broom wielding, riot clean-up gentrifiers who wanted toreclaim the “real London from those who are scum”.2Evidently, many of these people relished wielding self-righteousnessmore than their brooms. Upping the mood of moral outrage still furtherwas the e-petition demanding that looters, rioters, their flatmatesand families3 lose their homes. Clearly the second part ofNew Labour’s sanctimonious mantra “tough on crime, tough on the causesof crime” never made an impression on this virtual constituency.
Such backlash to the civil unrest calls to mind the cautionary remarkof a Parisian train driver in 1995, quoted by French sociologistPierre Bourdieu. Following a terrorist attack on his train, the driverwarned against any want to take revenge on the Algerian community.“‘They are’, he said, ‘simply people like us’.”4 Bourdieuelaborated on the driver’s point; “It is infinitely easier to take upa position of for or against an idea, a value, a person, aninstitution or a situation than it is to analyse what it truly is, inall its complexity.”5
The question has to be asked, had the mass of young people who riotedin London had a more ‘affirmative’ political message would they beviewed by UK politicians and media with the same esteem they professto hold for the recent uprisings across the Middle East? Is it reallymerely a supposed lack of a clear political objective that has madethe London and other riots so objectionable? After all, what could beclearer than ‘Not This!’, in all their multiple, overlapping contexts?Beatrix Campbell’s 1993 book Goliath, which looks at the 1991and 1992 suburban riots in England, attests to their disavowal, thus:
“These extravagant events were an enigma. They made worldwide news andyet they seemed to be powered by no particular protest, no just cause,no fantasy of the future. However, even in their political emptinessthey were telling us something about what Britain had become; themessage in the medium of riotous assemblies showed us how theauthorities and the angry young men were communicating with eachother.”6
Yet if such a reductive view contains some validity, then how, if atall, can this situation become otherwise? To make a more genuine startthan the broom wielders and their draconian allies, I suggest we lookfirst to the 1970s. What follows is a development of my graduatedissertation, which explores the changing face of photography inBritain in that period. By taking a retrospective look at thecommunity photographers, their political successes and failures duringthe ’70s, I think we can begin to understand more about thesituation we find ourselves in today, while acknowledging thepolitical foreclosures that have happened since.
The Rear View
By the 1970s many photographers had grown tired of the continualdemands of a competitive and commercially driven practice. Thefalsifying of truth and the empty stylisations of pseudo-realism, aswell as the emphatic use of stereotypes – all predominantly forcommercial gain – were becoming highly disputed. Some photographerswere prepared to sacrifice financial gain for a more fulfilling,socially useful practice.7 The newly appointed photographydepartment within the Arts Council of Great Britain, created in 1973,also meant that funding opportunities were much more readilyavailable. As the Arts Council encouraged practice at a grass rootslevel, community orientated projects were set to benefit the most.This guarantee of funding from a recognised government body allowedestablished practitioners some emancipation from the highlycommercialised work which had previously been one of the few avenuesthat offered most photographers any form of financial support.Although they weren’t necessarily making money, with governmentfunding and a programme of in-house fund-raising events, projectscould generate enough income to sustain themselves and for some theyprovided the only viable alternative to unemployment. “It was a timeof idealism; those involved gave their time freely to a movement theythought exciting and important.”8
The majority of the practitioners involved with these new communityprojects were, perhaps obviously at the time9, politicallyand socially ‘left-leaning’. Continual reference to the work of theMass Observation movement10, The Film and PhotoLeague11, and Worker-Photography Movement12 incontemporary and subsequent journals and exhibitions outlined howimportant the early decades of the twentieth century were among manycommunity photographers. The social documentary genre that haddeveloped in the 1930s greatly influenced the work that was producedat this time. Many photographers adopted the paradigm of theworker-photographer, using photography to expose social issuesrelating to poverty, housing and education, and energised the workingclass to try wrest control of their own situation.13Through collaborative workshops and events, a social network of groupsformed that was open to everyone and anyone who had an interest ingetting involved. Aided by the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s,and the continued push for widespread race, gender and sexualequality, the belief that change could come from below was strongerthan ever.
An important hub in the UK in all of this was The Photography Workshopestablished by Jo Spence and Terry Dennett in 1974, which brought withit the promise of a more inclusive and freely accessible photographicpractice, marking a renewed sense of the social purpose within themedium in Britain. Community photographers were proactive in theirresponse to the issues of the time and wrote prolifically on thesubjects of photography theory, education reform, and visualrepresentation. Their work provided the basis for these expandedphotographic debates and appeared as a challenge to a disinterestedaestheticism within photography and in the arts more broadly. Thesurge of alternative press organisations also facilitated thepublication of a great deal of this work and helped to establish anational network of community art based workshops.
Since the early 1900s, socially and politically progressiveorganisations had maintained an organisational relationship with theprinted press and self-publishing.14 Produced anddistributed cheaply and easily, photography, in this context, was thefitting vehicle for dissemination of political ideas by and for theworking class – for the communist groupings, it was essential theproletariat, as ‘the one revolutionary class’, be reached in order toadvance the necessary political uprising.15 Leap forwardmore than half a century of political agitation – includingachievements of women’s suffrage and the ‘end of Empire’ – during the1970s marginalised groups continued to use ephemeral material toensure widespread availability of their work and garner mass supportfor their causes. The start of the decade saw the publication of thefirst issue of Suburban Press, an anarchistic politicalmagazine, and continued with influential ‘minority’ publications suchas Spare Rib and Gay News. Publications likeCamerawork, Ten:8, and Creative Camera helpedshowcase and disseminate the work that grew from community workshops.These publications also served as an important platform fordiscussion.
The inclusion of reader views and responses facilitated debate amongstreaders and contributors alike, and created an arena for full-bloodedpolitical discussions. In Camerawork, one reader’s criticism ofJo Spence’s leftist values and the “boring religion of Marxism”inspired Spence to write another full article in response.16The publication of ‘The Unpolitical Photograph’ was a clear indicationof the interaction between reader and editor and the shared belief inthe importance of debate. It is interesting to also reflect thatfollowing the riots of 1981 – grown out of racial tension, policeconfrontation, and inner city deprivation17 – portraits ofsome of the rioters were printed in papers like theDaily Mail and The People but also inCamerawork and Ten:8. The latter magazines offered arather different platform and viewpoint from which to understand thecauses and the motives for the riots. Of course we can find similardiscussions on the internet today but community photography was, veryimportantly, a way whereby people developed face-to-face relationshipsbased on trust.
Part of a broader political tradition of workers’ education18and history-from-below movements, the intellectual roots of thecommunity workshops can in part be traced back to Raphael Samuel, asocialist and lecturer at Ruskin College, Oxford, where in 1967 heembarked on a programme of history based workshops that were ‘open toall’. According to Samuel, the study and writing of history werereserved for specialist groups and those within the ranks of academichistory. The premise of these workshops was to counteract thiscontinued elitism and instil the idea that history belonged toeveryone. It was Samuel’s belief that teaching and research had“become increasingly divided, and both divorced from wider or explicitsocial purposes”.19 By adopting the form of a workshop, amore collaborative process was nurtured in which debate, argument andexploration into the theoretical principals of the subject wasencouraged 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, wasto act as a study aid and aimed for their readers to be bothcontributors and critics of the issues at hand.20
Much like the History Workshop, the more art-based workshops set outto encourage people to explore the issues of identity andrepresentation within their own lives but through the use ofphotography. Through image making, archival research, and theoreticaleducation in visual literacy, photographers felt they could engagepeople in gaining a fuller understanding of themselves, thecommunities in which they lived, and the problems within thosespheres. Don Slater indicates the movement’s apparent success in anessay published in issue 20 of Camerawork: “Communityphotography was the outcome of a specific form of production andconsumption which overruled the marketplace”.21 Byencouraging ordinary people to occupy the role of professionalphotographer, they were showing that they were more than justconsumers. The removal of the commercial middleman ensured a moreaccurate account of the situation by “keeping the least possibledistance between those who produce and those who consume theimages”22.
The majority of these groups’ core interests were the issues thatfaced the socially and politically marginalised: The Hackney Flasherswere feminist in theory, The Blackfriars Settlement were solelyconcerned with youth and education reform, and the major concerns ofMINDA were with race and an increased focus on fascist organising inBritain, to name but a few. To maintain a unified presence, mostworked under these monikers and very little work was accredited toindividuals, thus inspiring a group congeniality and sense ofbelonging. These workshops, for and by marginalised, discriminated andworking class groups, opened up a forum for debate and discussion onthe principals of photography otherwise absent. They not only taughtthe practicalities of photography but explored a purpose for takingphotographs within the context of their reception. Through subsequentdiscussions about their images, participants were encouraged to bereflective of themselves and their actions and were taught torecognise what was implicit in the images.23 By combiningtheory and practical work many people learned how to create work thatencouraged them to see themselves outwith the confines of stereotypes.In keeping with the whole history of the socialist project of workingclass self-representation, by taking control of how they, themselves,were documented, they were also (in theory) able to influence howothers viewed them.
Such a critical politics of representation inspired sophisticatedtheoretical development, none more so than Jo Spence’s self reflexiveproject Beyond the Family Album. As she writes, “There is noway I could have understood fully the political implications of tryingto represent other people (however well intentioned) if I had notfirst of all begun to explore how I had built a view of myself throughpeople’s representation of me”.24
Spence acknowledged that her previous work had been produced within afixed ideology that was not always in the best interests of manypeople, including those in her images. However, the benefits of whatSpence tried to achieve far out weighed any reservations she may havehad about the method. The Photography Workshop movement exploredrepresentation and endeavoured to inform young people, and others, howto understand themselves outwith media stereotypes and through thelens of ‘class conflict theory’ – drawing attention to powerdifferentials in society, emphasising social, political and materialinequalities – in the days before that sort of thinking was officiallyditched by New Labour.
In addition to the practical and theoretical teachings which workshopsprovided, most were able to offer a platform to exhibit the workproduced, and this added a further incentive to be involved. As wellas providing a platform for showing work, Andrew Dewdney, who was afounding member of The Cockpit Gallery, felt that exhibitions focusedthe participants and provided a legitimate avenue for audiencedevelopment. It was his opinion that “the exhibition was a powerfulmedium for output”25. Rather than relying on externalinstitutions for the space and funding to facilitate exhibitions,participants sought their own solution. Devised in this context by theHalf Moon Gallery, the portable exhibition was quickly adopted byseveral community art groups. By providing a travel-friendly packagethat could easily be delivered by post, photography could be exhibitedin a variety of locations ranging from community art centres andschools to foyers and corridors of offices and town halls. This formof exhibition gave many community photographers freedom outwith theconstraints of the art establishments and patronage control andallowed their work to be seen by the people it was most relevant to.The nationwide demand for such exhibitions facilitated theestablishment of several independent photography galleries during the1970s: the Cockpit Gallery in Holborn, The Side Gallery in Newcastle,Stills Gallery in Edinburgh, to name but a few. And of course the risein available gallery space also meant a rise in the chances to exhibiton a more wide spread basis. It was this collaborative nature of theworkshops that was central to their success.
Opportunities and Fault Lines
Although in many ways the workshops were succeeding, internalconflicts about political standpoints and the direction in which theseprojects should progress were starting to create a fractiousenvironment. The underlying principles that had shaped the activitiesof the Workshop movement had been, by their very nature,‘left-leaning’ but more specifically towards the old Left(s) of the1930s. Britain had changed dramatically since then and the nostalgiafor the tenets of a traditional Left was becoming outmoded with risesin more white-collar and media based jobs. By 1974 less than half thepopulation were employed in manual labour, compared to 75% in1900.26 During the ’70s the changing nature of theBritish labour market continued to fuel cultural aspirations that hadbeen fatefully implanted by the ethics of ‘the opportunity state’ andso the rise of upward mobility, in place of the rise of classequality, ensured the reduction of a socialist-orientated demographicand the destabilisation of the traditional (male) support base of aworking class left politics. Within the space of hardly more than adecade, 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 impacton the electoral strategies of the Labour Party to gain power at theexpense of advancing socialism, the failures and crises ofconsciousness (as before and since) among the ‘Peace and Love’generation of the 1960s saw the formation of a much more antagonisticand disenfranchised generation in the next decade. Massive cuts toeducation, mass unemployment and an increasing divide between old andyoung in the 1970s instilled a sense of animosity within the youth (inpart, a continuation of struggle with patriarchal power) and a risingdisillusionment towards all aspects of the parent and dominantcultures. The significance of youth responses to social and culturalevents became a much researched area of study in the 1970s, not leastwith the rise of Cultural Studies, and helped to secure the importanceof the education and race debates of the time. Adapting a moreanarchistic attitudinal outlook, such as the rejection of electoralpolitics, many young people of Britain in the 1970s had their ownideas about social reform; ideas which would lead to the formation ofthe Punk phenomenon.
Although the proliferation of Punk’s uttermost oppositionality wasshort-lived27, it still helped to spread more enduringfacets of anarchistic thought. Rather than adopt mainstream politicalmeans to agitate for social reform, Punk promoted a ‘Do It Yourself’ethos which inspired a whole generation of young and creative peopleto take matters into their own hands, and was the vehicle throughwhich many became politicised. Although ‘purists’ despised Punk’s riseto the level of Zeitgeist by the end of the decade, some basicfeatures of the movement remained, to be adopted and adapted bysuccessive generations. Establishment reaction towards Punk, as withprevious ‘moral panics’, helped to distinguish a clear British youthculture, one marked by a rising rejection of mainstream politicswithin the younger generation – a rejection which would go on toinspire, 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 Workshopcollaboration, had always been concerned with the continued workingthrough of a Left politics within their work, emphasising theimportance of change from below. The edging out of both Spence andDennett after only seven issues of Camerawork was an indicatorthat people were becoming wary of being thought of as out-of-date andwanted to inhabit a more populist space.28 Following theseevents, Camerawork began to adopt a different tack; theypublished their last serious article on community art in 1980 andunderwent a physical change in format. It made a conscious effort toinclude work about more mainstream media culture and practitioners whowere more concerned with a gallery audience. A similar fate awaitedthe original members of MINDA. What started as creative disagreementsover the layout of their accompanying publication,Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF), soon became moredeep-rooted political feuds, which resulted in the disbanding of theoriginal 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 exploresthe success of The Face magazine, first published in 1980. Whenasked why they didn’t read Ten:8, visual communicationsstudents at West Midlands College gave answers such as; “It’s not likeThe Face…It’s too political… It looks too heavy… It’s got theratio of image to text wrong…I don’t like the layout…It depressesme…you never see it anywhere…It doesn’t relate to anything I know oranything I’m interested in…It’s too left wing… What use is it tosomeone 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 andteacherly; its contributors obsessed with arcane genealogies andinflated theoretical concerns”31 Epitomising the Thatcherera, The Face was a self-funded ‘street style’ magazine whichencapsulated everything that Camerawork and Ten:8 werenot; ‘a visual-orientated youth culture magazine’ whose circulationfigures reflected its then market success (selling 88,000 copies amonth). For whatever reason, it captured the imagination of what asignificant enough number of young people with disposable income werelooking for at that moment, and that, clearly, was not highlypoliticised wordy journals. The landslide victory of Thatcher in 1979marked the symbolic demise of the Left in party politics, just as thepublication of The Face in 1980 marked the demise of thepoliticised ‘history-from-below’ photography magazines that had drivenand engaged debates of the 1970s.
Both these ‘defeats’ signalled the decline of ‘the Left’ in enactingany successful mass alternative to neo-liberalism throughout the’80s, and beyond. Despite their best intentions, it was clearthat the community workshops were finding it increasingly difficult toconnect with some of the people they were intended to support. Theharshening conditions of mass unemployment, rising poverty and poorhousing – many seeing housing estates fall to a standard well belowthe poverty line – coupled with sensationalist media reporting andexploitation by politicians, combined to produce a general perceptionof a rise in criminality. These increasingly degraded conditions, withcommunity projects also suffering cuts, saw those most likely tocontribute and benefit move further beyond reach.32
Society’s Child
The final, and perhaps most significant, way in which workshop basedpractice began to falter was the increasing acceptance of photographyinto the contemporary fine art market by the end of the decade. By the1980s, the arts and education were being more fully positioned asaspirant entrepreneurial enterprise, and a boom in the art marketdirected interest towards perceived profitable forms. The growingfinancial interest in photographic work meant that community arts, andits infrastructure, became increasingly marginalised as a practice.(Thatcher’s infamous “there is no such thing as society” statementbeing delivered in 1987.33) The success of the workshopswas the more even playing field on which work was developed andpresented; participants working and debating together with no apparenthierarchy, the seeming opposite of the competitive and increasinglymarketised art school culture.34
Yet, whether by choice or by default, community photographers began tofind their work being placed in contexts it was never intended for andwhich tended to distance the genre from the communities where it wascreated. The closing chapter of this period was theThree Perspectives exhibition that took place at the HaywardGallery in London in 1979. Although it signified the growing influencethat photography had within the art world, it also saw those involvedrelinquish their critical stance regarding the fine art establishmentand marked the continued departure from more community orientatedwork.
By 1985 the time of idealism had passed, as Hebdige points out, “withthe public sector, education, the welfare state – all the big ‘safe’institutions up against the wall, there’s nothing good or clever orheroic about going under. When all is said and done, why bother tothink ‘deeply’ when you’re not paid to think ‘deeply’.”35More 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 in200836, along with so many other examples, ‘coolcapitalism’ has proven that even the most ardent expressions ofcultural dissent can, eventually, be absorbed into the dominantculture they seemingly once fought against.37 Whatever theflaws of the community workshops at that time, or the politicalweaknesses in their wider networks of support, this generation ofcommunity photographers did take equality seriously.
What is essential, now, is that we move against the real worldpositioning of working class youth as an underclass – or, the‘forgotten ones’38. Instead, like the community workshopethos, they need to be accepted as equals in what would be a moreinclusive society. This is not an argument I can make here but ifexamples are needed of not doing so, we need look no further than theglorification of CHAV culture or the apotheosised reception of parodypersonas such as Vikki Polard, to start to understand some of thecurrent problems facing the self-perception of young people. Moreover,to magnify the problem, as I pointed out at the outset, many of thosecharged with offences in the 2011 riots were, in fact, over the age oftwenty-four (up to 40%) but the real establishment outrage wasdirected at youth. As Hebdige observed, “youth is present only whenits presence is a problem or is regarded as a problem.”39If there was ever a need for education towards positiveself-representation of youth, one embedded in attaining structuralequality across society, surely the time is now.
Otherwise, one way to consider the perceived negative effects ofincreased low self-esteem – as an inextricable factor of structuralinequality40 – is to, again, look at Beatrix Campbell’s notunproblematic and not unchallanged description of the (male) youthcommunity in Blackbird Leys in 1991:
“Economically they were spare; surplus; personally dependent onsomeone else; socially they were fugitives whose lawlessness kept theminside and yet outside of their own communities. They had no job, noincomes, no property, no cars, no responsibilities… What they didhave was a reputation.”41
Society, as increasingly more fully incorporated into the operationsof the market, has become more about individuals than community; moreabout supposed entrepreneurs than co-operatives. At the very least theworkshops of the 1970s facilitated tangible artistic and creativedevelopment and opened up the hegemony of history writing to theworking class – a ‘history from below’ increasingly willing toincorporate women, workers, and subalterns of various kinds ashistorical agents.
The question remains, how do young people politically engage with asystem that seeks and succeeds to disenfranchise them? As SimonCritchely notes in his 2008 text, Infinitely Demanding, “thereis increased talk of a democratic deficit, a feeling of irrelevance oftraditional electoral politics to the lives of citizens […] wherecitizens experience the governmental norms that rule contemporarysociety as externally binding but not internally compelling.”42Contrary to Hebdige’s notion, ‘cool’ was not the key. As someone whowas a teenager in the mid-1990s, coupled with a distinct lack ofgeneral political teaching, the patronising displays of camaraderiebetween Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher et al were enough that Iremained politically inactive until my late twenties – success?! Youngpeople don’t want politicians to come ‘down’ to their level – a falsegenerosity and litmus of the imbalance. They want to be respectedenough to be allowed to engage their own decision making and maketheir own inquiry.
The workshops of the 1970s may have been flawed, nonetheless, they didfoster political ideals that strived to achieve a class-based historyas part of an oppositional engagement – aiming to “attack vigorouslythose types of historical enquiries which reinforce the structures ofpower and inequality in our society”43. By embedding theseideals within photographic and educational practices they were able toencourage and enact a more socially conscious and collaborative way ofworking. As Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsmen, says,“the head and the hand are not simply separated intellectually butsocially”.44
Notes
1 ‘UK riots: suspects, statistics and cases mapped and listed’, ConradQuilty-Harper, Amy Willis, Martin Beckford and Edward Malnick,The Telegraph, 12 Aug 2011:
2 ‘A few quick clarifications on the recent riots’, A group, London,Libcom, 28 Aug 2011:
Other contemporary articles relating to these and related issuesinclude:
‘Riot Polit-Econ – A Joint Report of the Khalid Qureshi Foundation andChelsea Ives Youth Centre’, avalable at metamute.org, 22 August2011:www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/riot-polit-econ
‘An open letter to those who condemn looting (Part one)’, avalable atLibcom,12 Aug 2011:
‘Detest and Survive: self-deregulation and asset reallocation inEngland, August 2011’ by Clinical Wasteman, avalable atmetamute.org, 17 August 2011:
‘Unlimited Liability or Nothing to Lose?’ by Clinical Wasteman,avalable at metamute.org, 16 August 2011:
‘The August 2011 Riots in Britain’, Ricardo Reis, Revolt AgainstPlenty, 23 August 2011:
Also, for a more recent overview, see: Mute Vol3 #2 (Winter 2011/12)‘Politics My Arse’:
3 ‘Westminster vows to evict social tenants involved in riots’, KateMcCann, The Guardian, 10 August 2011:
4 Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘A Train Driver’s Remark’ inActs 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 JimMcGuigan’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 engagingmembers of ‘excluded groups’ in historically privileged culturalarenas, see: ‘Beyond Social Inclusion: Towards Cultural Democracy’,The Cultural Policy Collective:
www.variant.org.uk/20texts/CultDemo.txt
10 The Mass Observation movement started in the 1930s – the populationwas encouraged to keep a record of their lives and then submittranscripts to the movement’s editors for analysis and storage. Theaim was to obtain an ‘intimate’ record of peoples’ day-to-day lives.Writers recorded conversations overheard on buses or in pubs, theirviews on current affairs or technological advances of the day, thefood they ate, how they spent their Sunday afternoons and domesticissues.
11 The Workers Film and Photo League in the United States (known asthe Film and Photo League after 1933) was part of an extensivecultural movement sponsored by the Communist International and itsaffiliated national parties in the interwar period.
12 Starting in Germany and the USSR – and spreading across Europe, andto the United States, central America and beyond – the movementpromoted the depiction of proletarian working conditions and everydaylife. Communist-affiliated groups of amateur worker-photographers wereexhorted to lay bare, in a “hard and merciless light”, the iniquitiesand social ills of capitalism: “Photography has become an outstandingand indispensable means of propaganda in the revolutionary classstruggle.”
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 ofthe Plebs’, Colin Waugh, Workers’ Liberty, 16 January2009: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 ofAdvanced Studies,
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, BritishLibrary Sound Archives (April 2000).
24 Spence, Jo, Putting Myself in the Picture, Avon: CamdenPress Ltd, 1986, p.83
25 Andrew Dewdney, interviewed by Shirley Read Part 10-12, BritishLibrary 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,’ inPhotography/Politics 1, ii.
29 Minda, ‘Minda,’ in Photography/ Politics 1, p.139
30 Hebdige, Dick ‘The Bottom Line on Planet One: Squaring Up toThe 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 toWomen’s Own magazine, 31 October 1987:www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
34 The Face publishing a ‘Shock report’ on Thatcher’s artschool budget cuts.
35 Hebdige, Dick ‘The Bottom Line on Planet One: Squaring Up toThe 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 TateBritain, and several anti-art collage works by the King Mob collectiveincluded in the Tate Britain’s Collage Montage Assemblage exhibit inJuly 2008.
37 See McGuigan, Jim, Cool Capitalism, London: Pluto, 2010
38 In a society where currently you must be over 35 to be fullyeligible for Housing Benefit; where under 25s are bracketed for alower level of living ‘allowance’ Benefits; where the much lowerminimum wage for under-21s is alone frozen; where if you’re under 18you’re likely not entitled to Jobseeker’s Allowance; yet the age offull criminal responsibility is between 10 to 12 years. As we see fromproposals to further increase the age of retirement, ‘youth’ is aflexible, arbitrary, benchmark according to who’s counting and forwhat purposes.
39 Hebdige, Dick, ‘Youth surveillance and display’, inHiding in the light: On images and things (chapter 1), London:Routledge, 1988
40 “As Nancy Fraser has argued, cultural domination, non-recognitionand disrespect invariably involve economic and political inequities.”See: Fraser, Nancy, ‘Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on thePostsocialist Condition (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 15, cited in‘Beyond Social Inclusion: Towards Cultural Democracy’, Cultural PolicyCollective: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:
44 Sennett, Richard, The Craftsmen, London, Penguin Books,2008, p.45