In 1981 I was commissioned by the Handsworth pressure group Affor to undertake research into the growth of sweated labour. This report gives a broad historical perspective alongside many specific examples and case histories, mainly drawn from the West Midlands. It analyses the way successive governments deliberately created an economic underclass in Britain’s inner cities and shows how trades unions, the factory inspectorate and the Wages Councils were unable to curb abuses and exploitation.

Ten.8 magazine evolved out of the attempts of a group of West Midlands-based to establish a photo gallery. The magazine’s initial aim was to provide a showcase for local work, although it also had a strong editorial bias towards exploring the broader, theoretical issues around representation. 

The original Ten.8 project had been funded by West Midlands Arts with a specific, local brief. It had become clear that the magazine had a much wider audience and eventually the Arts Council stepped in to continue funding it. The first issue of this new regime focussed on a variety of documentary practices, a reflection of the prevailing interests of myself, Brian Homer, John Reardon and Roy Peters, who all worked on the issue. Magnum photographer Abbas visited our office in Handsworth for an interview and Ed Barber and Jenny Mathews, who were based in London, began their association with Ten.8.

The premise of this issue – edited by Ed Barber with Brian Homer and myself – was to examine how the increasingly scarce funding for documentary work alongside the crisis of confidence in the power and validity of the documentary image were converging at a time when the need to document some of the profound changes in British society were felt to be most acute. The high levels of unemployment; cuts in funding for education, health and housing; the rise of racism – these were all issues involving the invisible or unvisual. How should photographers respond to the restrictions being placed on their practice?

In September 1981, 36 women chained themselves to a fence at Greenham Common military base in Berkshire to protest the decision to site 96 US Cruise nuclear missiles there. This action, and the documentary work around it by many associated with the magazine, became the inspiration for this issue. It also examines the crucial role played by photography in the nuclear debate and the fragmented photo history of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Writer Jeremy Seabrook argues that one of the reasons why photography had diffculty in conveying the pain of unemployment in the 1980s was because the site of the struggle had been removed to a less accessible place – the inner landscape of the mind. Also includes Tish Murtha’s images of youth unemployment in Tyneside and John Taylor on documentary realism in the 1930s, including 18 images from Bill Brandt’s The English at Home.

This edition marked Stuart Hall’s first serious engagement with Ten.8: I asked him if he would write about images of post-war Black settlement in the UK based around images John Reardon and myself had curated from people’s private collections, work discovered in local high street studios and in various photo agencies. His response, Reconstruction Work, was a landmark essay that triggered a massive response in terms of interest in the archive and how images could be recuperated. This edition also includes a significant analysis of media stereotyping of Asian women by Pratibha Parmar, Val Wilmer on Van DerZee’s hidden history of Harlem and, in collaboration with the Photographers’ Gallery, a catalogue of the exhibition Staying On, an historical survey of immigrant communities in London with essays by C L R James and Farrukh Dhondy amongst others.

This edition brought together work by Roy DeCarava, the father figure of Afro-American photography; Sunil Janah, the pioneer Indian photojournalist; alongside David A Bailey’s assertion that the work of the D-Max group marked a significant shift in Black photographic practices in the UK. It also includes Maxine Walker’s report on Polareyes and the issues raised by producing a magazine by and for Black women photographers.

After 12 years of being produced in A4 format, the magazine finally lived up to its name and changed to a 10in by 8in format and, in an attempt to become financially viable, increased the pagination and number of full colour pages along with a proportional increase in cover price. This edition contains a seminal essay by Jo Spence, Cultural Sniper, where she reflects on how class identity has shaped her work. Rosy Martin, who worked with Spence, explores the dichotomy between private self-exploration and the act of public display in her work around photo therapy. Kobena Mercer describes how black photography came out of the shadows in the 1980s, with images by Sunil Gupta. John Akomfrah describes an imaginary exhibition on the theme of displacement with photographs by Lyle Harris and Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and Eddie George examines how the rapper and the photographer are engaged in projects of rescue and rearrangement, with photographs by Vincent W and Coreen Simpson.

A comprehensive survey of work being produced at the threshold of the digital revolution, much of which still retains relevancy and interest, with an introduction by Andy Cameron. Victor Burgin on the psychical space of the computer; Tim Druckrey on the merger between technology and representation; Martha Rosler on the seduction of digital fantasy; Trisha Ziff on the digital family album; an original short story The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson; Jaron Lanier interview; plus work by Esther Parada, Eva Sutton, Barbara Jo Revelle, Jim Adams, Pete Dunn, Christopher Burnett and many others.

Critical Decade is an account of black British photography in the 1980s. It maps out the terrain of black cultural politics during a period of rapid and turbulent change which encompassed several paradigm shifts in both theory and practice, and was marked by a powerful synergy between race, politics and representation. This issue reprints several key articles from the previous 11 years and sets these alongside contemporary reassessments of the era and its impact. This unique juxtaposition of the work of nearly 50 photographers and writers provides an insight into a range of key issues around post-colonial theory and the critical questions of hybridity, marginalisation, essence and identity.

A collection of interviews with members of the black community in Handsworth which attempted to convey the experiences, frustrations and sense of bitter injustice felt by young black people in their dealings with the local police force. Most of the interviews were collected by local bus driver Carlton Green in clubs, pubs, churches and in people’s homes and Brian and I spent several weeks in 1977 editing the transcripts into this book. With an introduction by Clare Short.

The text for this book was originally prepared to try to influence sentencing patterns in Birmingham Magistrates Court where young Rastas were routinely handed custodial sentences for extremely minor offences. Brian and I saw that it could have a much wider appeal and audience and so set about expanding the text, giving more background and explaining more about the history of Rasta. We set up our own publishing imprint, Press Gang, and distributed the book from our office in Handsworth. In all, we printed and distributed 11,000 copies of what was the first serious attempt to describe the growth of Rastafari in the UK.