Exposure! Young British Photographers
Photographs From Blitz Magazine 1980-1987
Compiled by Simon Tesler and Jeremy Leslie
Ebury Press, 122 pages, 1987
A year ago, when a new book called As Seen in BLITZ: Fashioning ’80s Style was published I knew that cover shot looked familiar and not just because I likely have the particular issue of the magazine it was featured in originally. It took me a few moments a quick dig through my library, but I soon pulled out my copy of Exposure! Young British Photographers: Photographs From Blitz Magazine 1980-1987 and sure enough, there it was, the photograph “Scarlett” by David Hiscock.
I sat down again with the book last week, paging through the black-and-white photographs that so definitely captured not the 1980s I lived, but the 1980s I desperately longed for my life to be.
As a Canadian teenager growing up in the suburbs, magazines were the only real connection I had to the larger world of fashion, music, nightlife. I often wish I had documented the great and colourful local characters who hung around my city’s single alternative club. Looking back, they were just as interesting as those featured in Exposure! It was just a different cast, in a different part of the world, but all part of the same play.
The photographs sit one to a page and are beautifully reproduced. Text is minimal, but not missed. Sometimes, as with this book, it’s best to let the images breathe.
There are familiar photographers featured here, most notably Nick Knight and Tim Richmond, and it is fascinating to see examples of their early work. There are also familiar faces like Madonna, Morrissey, The Cure’s Robert Smith and Andy Warhol, but this is hardly a celebrity-centric photo-wank. Rather, it’s balanced with fashion images and portraits of important arts figures of the day like writer Kathy Acker, dancer Michael Clark and filmmaker Derek Jarman.
Exposure! is a gift of a book for anyone who lived through the ’80s poring over the pages of Blitz, and surely an education for those too young to remember this particular back-in-the-day.
