Art reviews: After the End of History | Christian Noelle Charles | Francis Macdonald

After the End of History at Stills in Edinburgh is a breath of fresh air, writes Susan Mansfield

After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024, Stills, Edinburgh ★★★★

Christian Noelle Charles: Wait A Minute?!!, Glasgow Print Studio ★★★

Francis Macdonald: My Dog & Other VIPs, Fire Station Creative, Dunfermline ★★★

Installation view of After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 at Stills, Edinburgh

It was the economist Francis Fukuyama who described the fall of the Berlin Wall, the moment which marked the triumph of Western liberalism over Communism, as “the end of history”. Writer and photographer Johny Pitts, curating this show of working-class photography for Hayward Touring, makes this milestone his starting point. After the left-wing focused anti-Thatcher energy of the 1980s, what has become of the working-class and working-class creativity?

It’s a big question, and perhaps no single show, however wide-ranging, can answer it. This one is less a set of reasoned arguments than a broad exploration of the subject, capturing a time when traditional notions of working-class culture and identity were disintegrating, with little to put in their place.

Featuring 26 photographers, After the End of History is kaleidoscopic rather than chronological. Some of the earliest images are from Edinburgh’s Sandra George, documenting buildings, people (particularly women) in the city, and the community activists trying to help them. Among the most recent is Hannah Starkey’s staged image of a woman in cyber-goth-style dress walking past a mural in Belfast in 2022.

Perhaps the biggest shift from past generations of photographers, from Thomas Annan to Oscar Marzaroli, is that there is little or no sense of a middle-class gaze. The images in this show are produced within the communities they depict. Photographers like Nathaniel Telemaque, exploring the experience of young men in North west London, and Rene Matić, in Peterborough, are photographing the places in which they grew up.

Installation view of Wait a Minute?!! by Christian Noelle Charles

The leader in this particular field is surely Richard Billingham, who came to the fore in the mid 1990s, at the same time as the Young British Artists, with his candid photographs of his alcoholic father and obese, chain-smoking mother in their West Midlands council flat. Thirty years on, these images are as striking as ever, intimate and unflinching.

Yet, in terms of representing working-class experience, they are only ever part of the story, and in a show like this are at risk of looking dangerously stereotypical. We need more perspectives: Richard Grassick’s long-term documentary work with a farming community in the North Pennines, Kavi Pujara’s pictures of the Sikh community in Leicester, early work by Elaine Constantine (now a well-known fashion photographer)documenting Northern Soul fans.

Some of those featured make particular choices regarding medium. Sam Blackwood uses his phone; Antony Cairns – the only moving-image artist here – uses obselete equipment, including a robot designed in Germany in the 1930s; Khadija Saye – who lost her life in the Grenfell Tower fire – worked in wet plate collodion, a Victorian process, making images which are eerily timeless.

Tom Wood used out-of-date film stock for his pictures of bus journeys on Merseyside, adding a moody, grainy, quality. Kelly O’Brien’s work about her grandmother, and Rob Clayton’s pictures of the Lion Farm Estate in Oldbury have a poignant, determined respectability which is as much a part of working-class experience as Sam Blackwood’s dirty beer glasses and brimming ash trays.

Detail of Francis Macdonald's drawing of Michael Marra

Pitts adds his own commentary to most of the labels, letting us know that a certain person’s work reminds him of Jean Genet, or Ed Ruscha. It’s interesting, but a little annoying too, as if he’s always looking over your shoulder giving you the benefit of his expertise. The show’s soundtrack – music Pitts’ sister recorded from a pirate radio station in Sheffield – is ever-present and somewhat distracting; it seems like galleries are not accessible enough if they are too quiet.

These quibbles aside, this is an ambitious, interesting show which is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. Artists self-identifying as working-class is a recent phenomenon, but it brings with it permission to be a breath of fresh air in the stuffy hot-house of the art world. This gathering of such voices is not so much a breath as a storm-force wind.

Community is very much present in Christian Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition for Glasgow Print Studio, in her case the African and Caribbean diaspora in Glasgow of which she has been a part for a decade. One of the first works we see in this show is Reaching Hands, a collage of colourful screenprinted hands, a chorus, a multitude.

Charles says the show is about solitude, that the title Wait a Minute?!! is a call for a moment’s peace, a space for reflection in which an individual – specifically a black woman – can forge her identity. However, it seems to return again and again to themes of connection. The visual language of phones and screens is ubiquitous.

Printmaking – particularly screenprinting – is central to Charles’ practice, enabling her to use photographic elements in her work, to make layers and print multiple versions of an image in different colours. The bold shades and repeating, stylised images give the show a definite pop art aesthetic.

In one corner there is a bed, the ultimate signifier of private space, but it doesn’t feel fleshed out enough as an idea to be a real installation. In the opposite corner, a second bed is part of a replica teenage bedroom with a dressing table, pink CD player and prints dotting the walls like posters. Even the bedlinen is printed with words and phrases: Relax; It’s all good.

However, Say Her Name is not just any old girl’s bedroom, a space in which an identity is made. It’s a kind of memorial for 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, shot by police in her bed in 2020 during a ‘no-knock’ raid. Sometimes, even one’s private sanctuary is not safe: wait a minute, and think on that.

Important as this story is, it’s a big shift in tone. Whether we were thinking about solitude or connection, this has the effect of dropping the viewer into an emotional chasm. The show is promising but uneven, a reminder of the importance of taking your audience with you, guiding them – even in the subtlest of ways – on the journey you want them to take.

Francis Macdonald, Teenage Fanclub drummer and Bafta-nominated composer, is also something of an artist. He draws every day, in pencil, ink, charcoal or pastel, holding to the advice of the Scottish Colourist JD Fergusson that you don’t correct a drawing, you just make another. A selection of portraits, still lifes and studies of Sita, his Romanian rescue dog, is currently at Fire Station Creative in Dunfermline.

His portraits are an eclectic mix, from actor Ruth Jones, to football manager Jock Stein, band leader Bill Haley to Mick Jones from The Clash. Presumably, he works from photographs, but he adapts freely and knows how to pick out a telling detail. Michael Marra is a delight, as is Kathy Staff, in full Nora Batty mode. Stravinsky is bespectacled and studious, Mondrian a dashing young aesthete.

His studies of Sita, by contrast, are likely done from life. We see him grappling with that third dimension while trying to nail down her essential dog-ness. Simplicity is the key to this work, but simplicity is hard. Macdonald doesn’t always pull it off, but when he does, he captures the essence of his subject.

After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 ends 28 June; Christian Noelle Charles: Wait A Minute?!! ends 31 May; Francis Macdonald: My Dog & Other VIPs ends 27 April​