Photographs by Julian Germain, Tommy Harris and the people of Consett > Edited by Julian Germain

Steel Works (1986-90) describes the effects of the radical economic changes in and around Consett, in the north of England, as a result of the ruthless Thatcherite politics of the time. The title of Kevin Smith’s 2004 book on that period, Civil War Without Guns, describes the nature of the brutal social confrontation that took place in the UK between 1980 and 1985. What was ground-breaking about Steel Works was the fact that Germain mixed his own work with photographs made by Tommy Harris, a steel worker and part-time photographer who had worked for decades for the local newspaper, and with vernacular photographs from workers’ family albums, and a reportage made by star reporter Don McCullin for the Sunday Times Magazine. Germain thus gave birth to a practice that would later be labelled ‘postmodern visual history writing’. Its essence resides in the fact that no one voice can be authoritative: history is by its nature the product of multiple voices and of recombining records from different moments in time. Or, as Frits Gierstberg recognised in Perspektief No. 41 in 1991: “By juxtaposing different types of photography Germain brings up for discussion their separate claims to authenticity and historical reality within the presentation itself”.

Bas Vroege, curator of Multivocal Histories, Noorderlicht International Photofestival, Groningen, the Netherlands, 2009

Unlike in the family snaps and in Tommy Harris’s local press photos, Germain’s subjects rarely look you in the eye. Brassy colours conceal emptiness and would seem to urge temporary gratification. Colour-gloss itself becomes Germain’s metaphor for what has been sacrificed in moving from a black-and-white world to a full colour one. And the result is that there is nothing left of the naïvity and hopeful enthusiasm which shouts from every picture Tommy Harris ever took. Germain’s gaudy colours alert us to the ‘esprit de corps’ and deep personal bonds that have vanished and for whose loss the steelworks closure is only a symbol.

David Lee, introduction of ‘Steel Works. Consett, from steel to tortilla chips’, Why Not Publishing, 1990