In Colour Works: The 1980s and 1990s, Homer Sykes brings together over 140 photographs made across two decades. The publisher describes this as a golden period for magazine commissions: the Thatcher years, when advertising was plentiful and adventurous and the new colour magazines prospered and commissioned photography as never before. Sykes was constantly busy, covering many subjects, including work made on international assignment as well as the British life featured in this book, and he was given great freedom in editing his work.
The book’s range is its argument. Hard-hitting news stories — the Miners Strike, the siege of the Iranian Embassy, the Women’s Peace Camp on Greenham Common, the Brixton riots — sit alongside broader social issues such as poverty, housing and rural life. Sykes has said he photographed with a subjective eye for an objective purpose; the phrase fits the sequencing, since these are neither neutral records nor private notations, but a very British story told in his unique way.
Extended captions give the photographs a second life. Rather than place and date alone, they offer a social and historical standpoint, giving the reader another perspective and allowing individual frames to be read against the conditions that produced them.
The book is published by Dewi Lewis: hardback, 192 pages, 143 colour photographs, 290mm x 230mm. Homer Sykes published his first book in 1977 and has since published over 16 more. His work has featured in magazines worldwide and he has exhibited widely, his first show being held in 1971 at the ICA, London; in 2014 the Maison Robert Doisneau museum in Paris gave him a one man show, the first ever for a British photographer.
