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Johny Pitts - After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024

Where did all the working class photographers go? This was a question posed by Johny Pitts when he started thinking about curating the exhibition that became After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024. The answer comes in images by a diverse array of more than twenty-five artists that make up the exhibition. As the show arrives in Edinburgh from the Hayward Gallery as part of a UK tour, it highlights an often-overlooked era in British photography. 

“As a kid I started to see the old world disappear, and this new world ushered in by neo liberal capitalism,’ says Pitts, who draws the title of the exhibition from American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. “On the one hand there was the complete destruction of working class community, but then there was this kind of resurrection of it through capitalist consumption. Yet what lingers are the ghosts of a working class culture, and even within that framework that is anti working class, a kind of working class identity and solidarity emerge.’

 

Highlights of the exhibition include Richard Billingham’s warts and all studies of his family, Elaine Constantine’s shot of a Northern Soul dancer in motion, and Kavi Pujara’s ode to Leicester’s Hindu community.

 

“I'm hoping that this show can have a little appraisal of the last thirty to thirty-five years,’ says Pitts, “and help show what was done to the working classes, where we might have gone off the trail, but also show where there have been moments of connection in what is a very multicultural show, and where working class communities have built something. As the world seems to be falling apart, this is trying to show a different end of history.’ 

 

After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024, Stills, Edinburgh, 21stMarch-28thJune.


The List, March 2 025

 

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