British artist wants to reunite with teenagers she photographed in 80s

British artist Ingrid Pollard’s work is set to feature in an exhibition at London’s Tate Britain of photography from the 80s and wants to catch up with some of her subjects from the era.

In 1989, Pollard was invited to Tulse Hill School, a school in the south London borough of Lambeth, to photograph the students. 35 years later, these portraits will hang in one of the city’s most prestigious galleries and Pollard has made a call-out for the boys pictured to get in touch.

A year after Pollard took the photos, Tulse Hill School closed, marking them as a portrait both of teenage boys from the era and a final snapshot of the school.

The boys are likely now in their 40s and 50s.

“I’ve often, far more recently, wondered what they’re still doing, if they’re still in south London. They might be out of the UK, anything,” she told the BBC.

“I think if we find some of the boys, they might remember people’s names. They could still be friends,” Pollard suggested. “I did ask their English teacher, but she doesn’t remember.”

It’s the first time this set of images will be featured in a major gallery exhibition from Pollard, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022.

Pollard, who was born in Guyana in 1953, is known for her work documenting Black British life through photography, for which she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to art.

Her work will feature alongside 70 other photographers in Tate Britain’s massive upcoming exhibition ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’.

Running from 21 November to 5 May 2025, ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ charts the “tumultuous” Margaret Thatcher years of the nation through nearly 350 images. This is documented through images from “John Davies’ post-industrial landscapes to Tish Murtha’s portraits of youth unemployment in Newcastle”.

Some of the most consequential moments of the decade are featured in the exhibition. The miners’ strikes are caught by artists like John Harris and Brenda Prince while Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright captured the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Photos from Syd Shelton and Paul Trevor depict the era’s anti-racism demonstrations, while impact of Section 28 and the AIDS epidemic are featured in the work of Tessa Boffin, Sunil Gupta, Grace Lau, Ajamu X, Lyle Ashton Harris and Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

For Pollard, this exhibition is significant in that it platforms photos of many ordinary Black teenage boys who would have been overlooked by the artistic establishment at the time. “They had certainly not been photographed that way before,” she said.

‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ is at Tate Britain from 21 November 2024 to 5 May 2025.