Ten.8 grew out of desire by three Birmingham-based colleagues to galvanise the city’s photographers. Derek Bishton, a journalist, and Brian Homer, a photographer and graphic designer had gravitated to the city’s burgeoning alternative scene, setting up a design studio in Handsworth. John Reardon was a photojournalist. Their inspiration was Camerawork, the legendary East London photographers’ collective. It comprised a gallery and workshop space and – crucially – a periodical. Camerawork was part of a network of photography galleries that was expanding at that time across the UK, in response to growing pressure on public arts funders from photographers.
With efforts to establish a photography space in Birmingham stalled, Bishton, Homer and Reardon convinced West Midlands Arts to fund a photography magazine instead. They hoped that it would be the catalyst that would bring together the city’s scattered photographers and eventually led to the establishment of its first photography gallery. The first issue of Ten.8 was published in 1979. The title derived from the standard size (in inches) of photographic paper, and was always meant to be used “ironically”. An editorial, signed by Bishton and Homer, along with others including John Taylor, announced that its aim was “to get as many pictures as possible seen and to stimulate debates about the implications of photography.”
With its tabloid-style (A4 folding to A3) format and preference for large, bold images, issue one was unashamedly modelled on Camerawork magazine. The early issues of Ten.8 reflect the struggle to forge an identity that could accommodate its twin aims: to showcase photographs while “debating the implications of photography”. With its distinctive stepped logo, the first three issues tastefully display
portfolios by local practitioners. Other features betray the influence of Camerawork’s focus on photography as a pretext for investigating the workings of power in society. In the inaugural issue, Roy Peters critiques photography in the Sunday supplements, while John Taylor, in the first of many ground-breaking cultural essays, invites readers to question documentary fact.
Over the decade Ten.8 evolved in many ways in sway of changes in personnel, format, financial fortune, and in response to cultural crosscurrents. The first major shift happened with issue 4. A young black
man points out of the cover image, one eye shut in mimicry of a photographer at work, and a shutter release bulb clutched in his other hand. The cover line reads, “Self Portraits” but the image says: “Gotcha!”. To understand the political impact of such an image at the time it’s necessary to remember that Britain’s inner cities were being shaken by race riots. The self-portraits were taken in Handsworth by local people at the instigation of Bishton, Homer and Reardon. Inside Bishton uses statistics to map a connection between immigration and racism and advocates self-portraiture as a means of political resistance to negative racial stereotyping in the media. Bishton believes this issue was a turning point. “We kind of opened the door from being a portfolio magazine, you know … privileging the photograph, lots of white space, to realising that, actually we could use this magazine as a vehicle for investigating lots of interesting ideas. And the first of those had been kicked up by our own work.”
Issue 5 was more like a glossy magazine with a spine. It announced itself as a “quarterly journal of photography.” Ten.8 always benefited from the proximity of higher education institutions such as Stourbridge College of Art where John Taylor worked. It became an important test bed for Taylor, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall among others and helped disseminate a brand of cultural writing.
Around the mid-80s Ten.8 began evolving from an alternative/ activist publication, in which writers and image makers collaborated to engage with racism, nuclear proliferation, unemployment, social unrest and so on, into a theoretical/ critical journal focused on “culture”. Contrast issue 17, 1985 (“Men in Camera”) with issue 18 of the same year.
Themed “Rule Britannia”, the latter contains an essay by John Taylor on “the Falklands Factor” illustrated with hard-hitting reportage. Another text about the miners’ dispute provides a unique platform for an extended sequence of John Sturrock’s images of miners in confrontation with police. Issue 17, with an essay by Hebdige, anticipates the new direction by focusing on the photographic representation of masculinity.
In the late 1980s Ten.8 established an exhibition service, Ten.8
Touring, under the direction of Rhonda Wilson. The final shift in identity came in the early 90s when Ten.8 reappeared briefly in its final manifestation as a stylish “photo paperback”. For all the change and upheaval, Ten.8 kept consistent with its founding ambition: to be about photographers and debates on photography. This may have been because both Bishton and Taylor stayed on the editorial board until to late 80s. The magazine provided a context for work by diverse critical and activist photographers - from Jo Spence and Network photographers, in the early years, to emerging black and Asian Britons in the late 80s.
Ten.8 became an influential international magazine, but its identity reflects the city of its birth, a melting pot of racial identities and radical politics. “We make no apologies,” goes the editorial in issue one, “for starting out from the area we know and working outwards, making connections as we go.”
David Brittain
Former editor of Creative Camera, currently AHRB Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University
