Over at Bonington Gallery an unfiltered time capsule of working class life is on display in the latest exhibition, After the End of History. Prompting questions about both change and continuity in British culture, over three decades of everyday life is revealed through the lens of 22 different photographers, including Richard Bilingham, Serena Brown and Rob Clayton.
The summer of 1989: the cold war was finally ending, and the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama publishes an essay called The End of History describing a triumph for the West, and confidently predicting that civilization was finally reaching its ‘logical destination’. Although this may take time to come to fruition, Fukuyama believed that the evidence was already there - from high politics and out into the consumerist Western culture on display, from China to Moscow, from Japan to Prague, and onto Tehran. But what about in working class Britain?
Taking its name from Fukuyama’s essay, this exhibition has been curated by Johny Pitts, a self taught photographer, writer and broadcaster from Sheffield, and presents over 120 photographs exploring how this ‘triumph’ has worked out, on the ground, for the working class in Britain.
Pitts provides a more personal view; informed by his life experience, focusing on the gaps he believes need filling – an important note to make to ensure that new caricatures of the working class aren’t formed
Pitts wants to ensure the audience leaves their stereotypical images of the working class, shaped by earlier photographers, at the door of the exhibition. Photographers, mainly middle-class, such as Roger Mayne and Shirley Baker are, for Pitts, too often provided as the reference point, and Pitts provides a more personal view; informed by his own, inevitably partial, life experience, focusing on the gaps he believes need filling – an important note to make to ensure that new caricatures of the working class aren’t formed and that both continuity and change are reflected.
Nana's Bathroom (2014) by Kelly O'Brien
Shop Proprietors (1990-91) © by Rob Clayton
There is a certain ‘messiness’ to the curation, which Pitts notes, was used consciously as a device to draw out the contradictory and diverse ways that the UK working class has evolved given the different influences on it – whether born of an optimism arising from, for example, the promises to be gained from new technology, to a bleaker outlook brought on by economic hardship. This does create some problems for the viewer, particularly given that the title draws our attention to history - without the order of any chronology, the people in the images can appear to be placed outside of history, and in no particular time.
It is worth taking a glance at some of these images by earlier photographers (British Culture Archive) to see that it was ‘grim up north’, but these also show great diversity of the working-class – a diversity of work experiences, ethnic background and mixed social life - across decades also covering great changes.
Time was not totally absent within the content. References to liminal space, such Kelly O’Brien conjuring up memories in Nana’s Bathroom, or as indicating a moment at the cusp of transition, with a shift from Thatcherism to something yet unknown, as in Tom Wood’s 1990s Bus Stop series.
A greater focus on chronological sequence could however have revealed to us more about how the people in these images have helped shape their own moment, and potentially, the direction of subsequent events. And this might have made it a bit easier for the viewers to interpret the unfolding story of the evolution and experience of the working class.
The Auditor Figures (1999) by Chris Shaw
A key aim of the exhibition was to give voices to the marginalised - focussing on groups of people Pitts thinks are absent from images prior to 1989 - different waves of immigrants; the daily life of the agricultural worker moving seamlessly between work and relaxation; the experience of working women; and the cool counter-cultural dancing youth. Where photographs reflect marginalisation, it is not clear to me whether this is as a problem to be overcome or revered in some way. The exhibition seems to do both, but the emphasis is on the latter.
In her version of taking control, Serena Brown’s ‘Clayponds’ (2018) is a jibe at the appropriation of working-class streetwear by predatory market forces – although, as we know, that cuts both ways with brand adoption by working class youth.
Providing a sense of isolation are several more traditional documentary style images depicting people experiencing the new reality of capitalism, whether of people working in marginal hotel jobs or of those living within forgotten housing estates and amongst its detritus. The images of Chris Shaw’s hotel workers ‘at rest’ are some of the best in the show as his slumbering workers depict the grainy truth of the exhaustion of hard graft.
The exhibition provides images challenging the idea that ‘the future has been cancelled’ as a result of the end of history (referencing the idea of thinker Mark Fisher who seems to have strongly influenced Pitts). The notion that the new market forces of neo-liberalism, and related commodification of all aspects of life, were a victory for the West, are questioned through the work of a new generation of working-class photographers and by the subjects they capture.
In her version of taking control, Serena Brown’s Clayponds (2018) is a jibe at the appropriation of working-class streetwear by predatory market forces – although, as we know, that cuts both ways with brand adoption by working class youth.
Clayponds (2018) by Serena Brown
Untitled (2022) by Hannah Starkey.
Some images stand out just because they are very arresting – Hannah Starkey’s, ‘Untitled’ (2022) being one: an apparition of a pink haired young woman or girl walking into a Belfast Street scene with a Protestant paramilitary mural, almost from another time and made more surreal and ominous due to the dark clouds and gulls circling overhead. It has a mythical quality about it, bringing the present and past together through the juxtaposition.
And a couple of final observations on what these images may tell us about what has changed after the end of history. When contrasted with the images of the working class prior to 1989, there does seem to be a difference in how people present themselves to the outside world. Stepping outside of the house, out into the public, seemed more clearly delineated in older photos – as in the symbolic dressing up and the putting on of, however poor, suits and smart clothes. This warrants further exploration on what this might represent.
And culturally, there tended to be some things that the working class kept private. Surely, for our sanity, we can’t always be on public display. The contrast between the sleep of the father in Richard Billingham’s Untitled (1993), in all his vulnerability, seems harshly exposing in comparison to the majesty of Chris Shaw’s The Auditor Figures (1999). Yet both are two of the best shots in the exhibition.
After the end of history: British working class photography 1989 – 2024 is on display at Bonington Gallery, Dryden Street, Nottingham, until Saturday 14 December 2024. Free entry.
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