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Photos of Thatcher’s Britain reveal the flashpoints of today

Fiona Macdonald
Features correspondent
Photographer Chris Steele-Perkins discusses his photos documenting social change in the UK

During the 1980s, Chris Steele-Perkins took photos of all sections of society, including National Front ers and drunken brawlers in a nightclub. In the tenth video of BBC Culture’s Through the Lens series, he discusses images that reveal the flashpoints of today.

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“Photography, to me, is about history to some extent,” says Chris Steele-Perkins in this video, the latest in Culture’s Through the Lens series marking the 70th anniversary of Magnum Photos. “It is about demarcating a period and a time, and trying to put that down… in imagery.”

As part of his work, Steele-Perkins documented Britain under the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s. In the video, he discusses images of National Front ers, opera-goers in a field of cows – and a drunken fight in a nightclub.

Despite recording a particular time across all sections of British society, he never aimed to offer any one version of events, revealing how he likes the ambiguity of photography. “You can read it in different ways, and they’re all right.”

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