The Legacy of Ten.8 Magazine

Earlier this month, the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham held a symposium that discussed the legacy of Ten.8 Magazine and ever since then, I have been thinking about its significance.

When in 1979 three Birmingham photographers started the magazine with the aim of providing a platform for local practitioners’ work, there was little to suggest that by the time of its closure in 1992 it would become a widely influential arts journal with subscribers around the world.

Yet this is precisely what happened with Ten.8 magazine, established by Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon out of their shared office in Handsworth, north Birmingham.

The significance of the magazine as part of Birmingham’s distinct cultural heritage has until now been strangely under-acknowledged within the city.  In general, the magazine has received far more attention in the seminar rooms of media studies departments, both in Britain and beyond.

It is perhaps a sign that this is beginning to change that the MAC hosted the symposium, with panellists that included both Bishton and Homer.

From the beginning, Ten.8 was concerned with engaging with issues that affected people in the Birmingham and Handsworth contexts.  Its editors saw photography as offering a way of overcoming negative representations of multicultural areas like Handsworth, places often characterised by high unemployment, social deprivation and poverty. 

Ten.8 regularly featured photographs by artists such as Vanley Burke, whose work attempts to present a different side to inner-city areas of Birmingham.  Alongside photographs, the magazine contained articles that challenged its readers to see photography as a possible tool for political change.

One of the magazine’s lasting legacies was the way in which it showed that photography is often at its most powerful when it is put in the hands of ordinary people.  Bishton, Homer and Reardon’s Handsworth Self-Portrait Project (pictured), which was first featured in the pages of Ten.8, remains one of the seminal examples of community photography.

It is almost twenty years since Ten.8 was forced to fold due to funding problems.  The issues it discussed, however - particular the themes of representation and power - clearly remain as pressing as ever, especially in the digital age.  How long before something else comes along to pick up Ten.8’s mantle?