Designing Power: Thatcher, Press Photography and a Polarized 1980s England

In What do Pictures Want W.J.T. Mitchell famously attributes the power that images hold in society to be made into everything and nothing, sometimes in the same breath, and ultimately how we “over-and underestimate” the impact of these very same images daily (2005: 3). Mitchell’s idea that images are deployed and analyzed in a multitude of ways is manifest across the discipline of visual studies: from slides of organisms in the medical sciences, to topographical photomapping of cities, to archives of trick photography, and, more insidiously, codified records for surveillance or political coercion by state institutions. These examples are each the result of a vast and intricate visual culture for photographic image delivery. The Thatcher years exemplify another example and the relationship between the “over-and underestimated” uses of press photography, and this relationship determines the framework for this essay’s investigation into this conservative, scopic regime. This article will attempt to trace the following ideas as they are developed in this analysis: Why are press photographs taken of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher worth recovering? Second, were Thatcher’s iconic images found in The Times newspaper congenial to the neoliberal economy of the 1980s? And, finally, how successful was the Thatcher image in symbolizing a free market ideology to the British people at this time?