Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

In Britain, the immediate legacies of the abandonment of the post-war settlement were registered in the cultural field through the emergence of a body of radical documentary that sought to reveal the structural nature of social inequality. Perhaps the most complex, yet hitherto neglected of those projects, was Exit Photography Group’s 1982 photobook ‘Survival Programmes in Britain’s Inner Cities’. This paper will propose to recover the important legacy of Exit’s project, while also situating the project within a discourse on the politics of representation and political activism forged in resistance to the ‘Rightward’ turn that took place in Britain during the 1970s. My work is performed through a close engagement with work of Stuart Hall and the literature that emerged from Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham during the seventies and eighties. It also deals with postcolonial theory and socialism.