In photos: 35 years of British working class photography

In 1989, as the fall of the Berlin Wall promised a hope­ful, con­nect­ed, new world order, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist and econ­o­mist Fran­cis Fukuya­ma declared the ​“End of His­to­ry”. With Sovi­et com­mu­nism all but fin­ished, his argu­ment ran that West­ern lib­er­al democ­ra­cy had ulti­mate­ly won out as the final form of human gov­er­nance. Yet with one-sided wars cur­rent­ly rag­ing in the Mid­dle East and the West’s inabil­i­ty (or refusal) to stop them, rapid­ly increas­ing rates of pover­ty, and exis­ten­tial crises as tech­nol­o­gy threat­ens to upend soci­ety as we know it – per­haps Fukuya­ma got a bit ahead of himself.

“You have the end of com­mu­nism, and this idea from Fukuya­ma, which was of course com­plete­ly mis­guid­ed,” says Johny Pitts – a writer and pho­tog­ra­ph­er who has curat­ed the new Hay­ward Gallery Tour­ing exhi­bi­tion After the End of His­to­ry: British Work­ing Class Pho­tog­ra­phy 1989 – 2024. ​“But it got me think­ing: ​‘What if you have work­ing class artists, or peo­ple iden­ti­fy­ing as work­ing-class tak­ing images after that real­ly icon­ic moment?’ What became of work­ing-class cul­ture? And in some ways, it’s me try­ing to work out my life grow­ing up work­ing class and it doesn’t seem as coher­ent as it did [for] the gen­er­a­tion before.”

That moment forms the frame­work for the exhi­bi­tion, which draws on the work of over two dozen work­ing-class pho­tog­ra­phers across the coun­try from the past 35 years. Fea­tured are the likes of Elaine Constantine’s shots from ​‘90s North­ern Soul dances, Kavi Pujara’s love let­ter to Leicester’s present day South Asian com­mu­ni­ty, and Sam Blackwood’s sur­re­al still life pic­tures fea­tur­ing drinks bot­tles and ephemera.

“My work is nor­mal­ly all about inclu­sion,” Pitts – who has pre­vi­ous­ly cre­at­ed books cel­e­brat­ing Black Euro­pean pho­tog­ra­phers, and a search for Black British­ness around the fringes of the UK – explains. ​“But this became an exhi­bi­tion about who I want­ed to exclude. With class you have so many artists from [work­ing-class] back­grounds, and sud­den­ly it opened up this world of pos­si­bil­i­ty, and the poten­tial for so many dif­fer­ent artists who sit side-by-side in a kind of new way.”

It means that many of the most instant­ly recog­nis­able pho­tog­ra­phers known for their work in doc­u­ment­ing work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties and cul­tures don’t fea­ture in the exhi­bi­tion – think Tish Murtha and Chris Kil­lip, whose stark, black-and-white images in the ​‘70s and ​‘80s helped shape British work­ing-class pho­tog­ra­phy and per­cep­tions of the com­mu­ni­ties they captured.

“You have all these social doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phers who are canon­ised – peo­ple who I real­ly admire by the way – but I feel like every­one knows that work real­ly well,” Pitts con­tin­ues. ​“I feel part­ly because of Thatch­erism, work­ing-class cul­ture lost its way a lit­tle bit and was com­mod­i­fied, then you have new fusions of music that came through in the ​‘90s and I thought it would be inter­est­ing to explore this time frame which is so often miss­ing when we think of what work­ing-class Britain looks like.”

There’s an enjoy­able mish­mash of work, rang­ing from Artúr Čonka’s warm por­traits of the Roma of New­port to Eddie Otchere’s shots from the hal­cy­on days of jun­gle. The exhi­bi­tion does not serve as a sur­vey of British work­ing-class pho­tog­ra­phy, but instead a cel­e­bra­tion of art and image-mak­ing from the mar­gins of soci­ety, and the diver­si­ty of the work­ing-class expe­ri­ence. With­in the pic­tures come a range of emo­tions, from moments of joy on dance­floors, to bleak­er por­tray­als of life.

“I wasn’t specif­i­cal­ly look­ing for a cel­e­bra­tion, I was look­ing for some­thing a bit ambiva­lent,” Pitts says. ​“I think it’s too easy to turn work­ing-class peo­ple into avatars for some moral point or pol­i­tics, where­as with this I want­ed to let it breathe. Some of it feels quite hap­py because work­ing-class life is not all bad, but some of it feels haunt­ed, you know.

“Like you have work by some­body like Khadi­ja Saye, which is very haunt­ing, and of course she was a vic­tim of the Gren­fell Tow­er fire. Or peo­ple like J A Mor­tram, who is a car­er,” he con­tin­ues. ​“So you have moments of dark­ness, moments where peo­ple are par­ty­ing. But the one thing you have run­ning through­out all the images is a depth and a soulfulness.”

After the End of His­to­ry: British Work­ing Class Pho­tog­ra­phy 1989 – 2024 is on view at Her­bert Art Gallery & Muse­um, Coven­try from March 29 until June 16, Focal Point Gallery, Southend from July 3 until Sep­tem­ber 14, and Bon­ning­ton Gallery, Not­ting­ham from Sep­tem­ber 27 until Decem­ber 14