Nervous Nineties

Colin Jacobson’s essay takes us through the decades that shaped post-war Britain and led it towards the titular Nervous Nineties – years marked by a sense of impending change.

It is a highly personal view, rooted in memory, but Colin – as a long-standing photo editor for leading British publications – also sketches a broader historical context: from wartime childhood, through post-war challenges and the cultural shifts of the following decades, to Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

These memories form a kind of background of remembrance for Witold Krassowski’s photographs: images that do not so much depict the world directly as allow us to feel its temperature, moods and everyday absurdities.

***

Memory and photography are symbiotic fellow travellers, both equally untrustworthy. Let’s get all the cliches out the way. History is written by the victors. All memory is selective and unreliable. A photo is just a moment in time snatched from an infinite number of possibilities. What the viewer sees and the photographer intends can have wildly different meanings. Memory is arbitrary – awake or asleep, we have little control over the accuracy or truth of what we choose to recall.

Have I imagined my past? Did I filter out only those things I wanted to remember? In the end, does it matter if there are fantasies based on some germ of truth? True or false, memories become part of our self awareness and identity. We all become authors in our own life story, absorbing memories to soften the harsher times and create a comforting feeling of continuity and connection through the decades we experience. 

Wartime Forties

I was a war baby, born in 1941 in the deeply rural county of Dorset in the west of England. My mother had escaped the horrors of the London Blitz while my father was a soldier away in the War. My mother’s memories of that time were no doubt dominated specifically by concern for my father’s safety and more philosophically whether her country would be absorbed into the Third Reich. Thinking back, my memories of that time were not of bombs or sombre radio war reports from the BBC but the non-stop noise of cows shitting in the fields around our cottage, an incessant plop-plop-plop. I hadn’t come across Marcel Proust at that tender age but to this day, if I come across the sickly sweet aroma of the wild flower, cow parsley (Anthriscus Sylvestris or Ravenswing), I have an instant recall to our safe, protected life in the countryside. I see those early years in filmic terms and often wonder if I have scripted my memories in hindsight, using artistic licence.

Post-war Austerity

My experience of the 1950’s was dominated by austerity and a feeling of being cold all the time. Few homes had central heating. America was experiencing a post-war boom, fuelled by huge profits from arms sales and repayment of war loans. Britain had won the war but everything was scarce and rationed. 

Half way through the 50’s, I went away to boarding school where it was even colder than my parents’ house – out of the fridge into a very expensive freezer.  I was unhappy there, being half Jewish in a heavily Christian environment, with all the implications involved. Moreover I had become something of an armchair Socialist faced with a jubilant, entitled atmosphere because the Tories had recently kicked out the ground breaking Labour government in 1951. 

I admired the style of the Teddy Boys (but not their violence) and took quiet satisfaction in getting a similar quiff and duck’s arse haircut in nearby louche Brighton. This was met with hilarity and mirth by my fellow pupils followed by incredulity when I told them it had cost me seven shillings and sixpence. Even so, I felt I had achieved a cultural victory. The peculiar mores of this school were underlined when a brilliant but wayward senior pupil called Gilkes was kicked out of the school. The housemaster, white as a sheet, announced that Gilkes had been expelled for “smoking and gross immorality”. Note the interesting order of priorities in the severity of his offences.

The Swinging Sixties

The Swinging 60’s arrived in a flurry of tabloid indignation coupled with a barely suppressed resentment from grown-ups whose formative years had floundered in the grey, dull atmosphere of the 50’s. The poet Philip Larkin brilliantly encapsulated the zeitgeist of the decade:

“Sexual intercourse began 

in nineteen sixty-three 

(which was rather late for me) – 

between the end of the “Chatterley” ban 

and the Beatles’ first LP.”

In spite of the widespread availability of the contraceptive pill, like Larkin, I missed out on the bacchanal world conjured up by the media and I suspect this was true for many of my contemporaries. We looked into the goldfish bowl and saw the wild excesses of bands like the Rolling Stones and felt there was an exciting way of life that had somehow passed us by. Besides, many of us were deeply alarmed by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and wondered if we would actually survive beyond our early 20’s.

I shared my first flat in London with a friend from home and university. It was a dank, damp flat near Paddington Station, heated erratically by a lethal anthracite stove which would never have passed modern Health and Safety checks. However,  it was extremely cheap. Our landlords were the Church Commissioners and the irony of this was not lost on us when we discovered there was a brothel on the floor above us run by Daisy.

The Thatcher Decade

During the 80’s, the Thatcher decade, politics swirled around like a hurricane as Britain woke up to the significance of her ideological revolution. I didn’t welcome the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, apart from anything, she reminded me of the most bossy of headmistresses. My felt experience as a reclusive family man turned me into an appalled but impotent observer of the subsequent turbulent social and political upheavals.

The savagery and bitterness of the long running coal miner’s strike soured the national atmosphere after the relative optimism of the 60’s. London Metropolitan police, never shrinking violets, were despatched to the midlands and north of England to beat the hell out of the strikers, which they proceeded to do with some relish. The failure of the strike had a vindictive aftermath as the Thatcher government closed down industry after industry leading to social and economic despair at a level not seen in Britain since before the war.

Nervous Nineties

Krassowski’s take on Britain in the late 80’s and 90’s is a version of an edgy, troubled nation. You get the feeling he enjoys being among the photogenic British but is astonished that the nation moves so slowly to remedy all its accumulated social ills, inequalities, hostilities. Did he set out to reflect all this social and cultural neurosis, post Thatcher, when the implications of her slash-and-burn policies began to sink in? 

When I look at Krassowski’s photos, I see a society not at ease with itself, waiting for Brexit, about to shoot itself in the foot. Is this just my autobiographical projection, looking back and remoulding meaning with the wisdom of hindsight? Did Krassowski absorb this angst-ridden feeling at the time, or did he recognise it was there all along, waiting to be captured in images? Perhaps he came to realise as he edited his work that this vision was lurking there all the time, sometimes explicitly, other times below the surface? And does it matter?

In the end, what we have here is a remarkably telling body of work, one photographer’s take on a foreign country, particular moments in time. We can evaluate, assess and enjoy these images just as images and then choose to project meaning on to them from our own perspective, using our memory bank and our own understanding of what this decade meant to us. 

Text: Colin Jacobson

Colin Jacobson: the prestigious and award winning English photo editor for several UK publications, including The Observer Magazine, The Economist, and the highly acclaimed Independent Magazine that he helped to launch in 1988. Colin has been on the jury of the World Press Photo Contest four times, including twice as chairman. He was the founder and editor of Reportage, a quarterly magazine of international photojournalism.