Event / 28 Jun 2018

A Decade in Images - 1980s/90s

As part of 40/40 Vision, a year long celebration of Ffotogallery's 40th Anniversary and running alongside our latest exhibition Chronicle, we are proud to present the third in a series of talks with industry professionals looking at photography over the last four decades.

Against the backdrop of the Thatcher years, between 1983 and 1992 David Drake established and ran a pioneering media centre in London focusing on photography, video and graphic design, as part of an independent media movement that included Four Corners, Blackfriars Photographic Project, Autograph, Watershed, f Stop, Fantasy Factory and West London Media Project. Working with artists and filmmakers such as Joanne O’Brien, Susan Trangmar, Ken Loach and Jamoula McKean, the organisation nurtured new talent and provided an oppositional voice to the prevailing socio-political agenda in Britain. As the 1990s dawned, digital technology and rampant commercialism brought profound changes to photography and media activism in the UK and the ‘independent photography’ movement started to fragment and change direction.

About David Drake

David Drake has 35 years experience at senior level in the visual arts and media sector, for the last 9 years as Director of Ffotogallery. His varied career has included extensive curatorial, publishing, management and production experience for organisations as diverse as Watershed, Arts Council England, Picture This Moving Image, FIVE magazine, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and HP Labs. During the 1980s he established and ran for ten years a groundbreaking media centre in London delivering industry standard photographic, television and design training programmes, in partnership with various broadcasters, cultural organisations and higher education institutions. David was Director of Visual Arts and Media at South West Arts 1992 – 2002, creating new artist development programmes and spearheading the regional arts board’s engagement with emerging technologies and wider creative industry agendas. In 1998 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Travel and Research Fellowship and spent six months investigating artists’ use of technology in North America and Europe. He was also producer of Electric Pavilion 2002-2005, a three-year online project showcasing creativity as found within the city of Bristol, and founder of the Bristol Stories digital storytelling programme.