Sandra George: Every Mother is a Working Mother
Johny Pitts responds to a recent review on this website of an exhibition he has curated called After The End of History: British Working-Class Photography 1989-2024, at the Hayward Gallery Touring
I grew up Black in a haunted place and time; Firth Park, Sheffield during and in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s long reign as British Prime Minister. My mother, grandma, aunties and uncles all worked at various times and in various capacities for the big steel works in Sheffield from which my area took its name, namely Firth Browns and Firth Vickers. I saw and felt first-hand the devastation caused by what Margaret Thatcher unleashed – the displacement of entire communities, the replacing of skilled labour with precarious unskilled jobs and zero hour contracts, and the undermining of the multicultural make-up of my area with racist rhetoric.
Photo credit: Artur Conka
In his sloppy, dismissive review of the show I curated about contemporary working-class life After The End of History; British Working Class Photography 1989-2024, not only has Angus Reid not done his research about who I am, he wants me to act as though Thatcher’s destruction of the working class had no effect, or ramifications. This is why it demands a response.
A few of Reid’s critiques are so bland that there’s not much for me to say. “Sometimes the questions raised by exhibitions are more important than anything they might offer as answers” is one of the insights Reid blesses us with, as if an exhibition of photography should ever be arrogant enough to offer ‘answers’. But it is the litany of inaccuracies about the work of the working-class artists I put together, as well as myself, that demands correction.
Had Reid done a little research about me, he might have thought twice about the following sentence: “This is a Thatcherite perspective that makes no effort to portray people except as degraded into wasters, into consumerists without a soul, into literal cannon fodder”. Not only is this insulting to me and my family but also to the artists I curated. “Wasters and consumerists without a soul”? This is how Reid sees the Romany family holding their baby at home, as depicted by Artur Conka? Kelly O’Brien’s quiet photographs of her grandma, who works as a cleaner? The elegant and haunting work of photographer Khadija Saye, who died in the Grenfell Tower fire? The everyday photographs of Leicester’s Hindu community by Kavi Pujara? Richard Grassick’s work documenting the struggles of a farming community to put food on the table? Nathaniel Telemaque’s convivial photographs from his North London estate? All work contained in After the End of History.
Equally as disrespectful is his misspelling of three of the artist’s names (JA Mortram, Josh Cole and Ewen Spencer), as well as wrongly claiming that the show is moving to the Hayward Gallery in London, and incorrectly describing Spencer’s work as photographs of Ibiza raves, when in fact they were taken in Ayia Napa – an important distinction to be made because the Cypriot island marked the opening of working-class travel specifically aimed at the Black community.
I am unconvinced that Reid has actually seen the show; better if he hasn’t, because if he has, he’s selective to the point of sociopathy. Are there photographs of working-class people dancing, kissing, going on holiday, having a laugh, dressing well? Yes! I don’t know how he grew up, but to reduce working-class communities to, in his words “strikes and…pickets…defiance…dignity” would be to render the messiness of the working-class life I know into merely a symbol of propaganda that plays on antiquated and cherry-picked depictions from the past.
Angus Reid would cordon off left wing politics and detach it from Internationalism and the realities of contemporary working-class life in order to aggrandise his own potted knowledge of British history. “In the context of British history, the fall of the Berlin Wall is hardly more important than the Battle of Orgreave”, he moans, without referencing the essay from which the exhibition I curated ironically takes its name – Francis Fukyama’s “The End of History?”. That essay, and his later book with a similar name, represents a distinct moment of Western/ capitalist triumphalism, and brings together Reaganite and Thatcherite messaging around the end of the cold war. The 1990s and 2000s, especially during the rise of Blairism, assumed a different logic to previous eras in that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was little to balance out the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism. I grew up in the wake of this, which is why the curatorial parameters of the show range 35 years from 1989 to 2024. Reid ignores these parameters, and the global ramifications of the end of the USSR, because he wants to see those black and white photographs of the Miners’ Strike again.
Richard Grassick: The Milner’s family kitchen, 1994
Finally, he describes me somewhat snarkily, in inverted commas as a “cultural activist” – I don’t know where he dredged that title up from, with its patronising, subtly racist connotations, but I have never used that term to describe myself; I’m a working-class artist, though perhaps because I’m not white and my work doesn’t fit into his reductive notions of what working-class art should be and look like, Reid has chosen to assign a label to me that suggests identity politics and culture wars. It is this kind of prejudiced, unimaginative, closed-minded thinking that is crushing the Left and, to throw Reid’s words back at him, needs to be treated “with the scorn it deserves”.
