‘Many people send me letters in England saying, “I want to be a war photographer,”‘ Don McCullin once proclaimed, ‘and I say: go out into the community you live in.’ There were, in the eyes of the veteran British photojournalist, ‘wars going on out there’ that you didn’t have to go round the world to see.

McCullin’s photographs of homeless people on the streets of East London (when Spitalfields meths drinkers huddled around improvised bonfires on the site of a future sanitised street food market) are one of many exhibits in Tate Britain’s sprawling The 80s: Photographing Britain which speak across the decades with the starkness and moral force of the best combat zone reportage.

If you’re looking for heartbreakingly vivid tableaux of a broken social contract, Tish Murtha’s Youth Unemployment series — compellingly documentarised in Paul Sng’s 2023 film, Tish — has them in spades. Chris Killip’s deeply embedded dispatches from the sea-coaling community of Lynemouth Beach (themselves fresh from a recent retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery) call into question whether that social contract ever even existed. As yet the growing familiarity of these increasingly widely-seen bodies of work does nothing to diminish their power, and there are sadder destinies for a photograph than to become curatorial shorthand.

Entering the exhibition, the first couple of rooms supply a similar head-rush of total political engagement to the one that the Tate’s Women In Revolt show brought to the same space last year. The display cases in the first room which then crackled with the irreverent energy of early feminist fanzines are now given over to the radical DIY strategies of the Half Moon Photography Workshop and the stylishly rigorous West Midlands photography quarterly Ten.8. The walls hum with the chin music of social conflict, from local activist Pogus Caesar’s urgent chronicle of what Steel Pulse would later call the Handsworth Revolution, through Format Photographers Agency co-founder Maggie Murray’s inspiringly smiley record of the Embrace the Base action at Greenham Common, all the way to John Harris’ now celebrated shot of his fellow photographer Lesley Boulton in the arc of a mounted policeman’s swinging truncheon at the 1984 Orgreave industrial clash.

What unites these historic events is that they actually took place in the 1980s, unlike 1977’s Battle of Lewisham and the Grunwick dispute of 1976 to 1978, which also feature. I love David Mansell’s photograph of arms-folded Grunwick walkout leader Jayaben Desai fearlessly trumping the hostile body language of an arms-folded police line, but the decade whose history it illuminates is the one in which it was taken. The idea of a ‘Long Eighties’ — one which actually stretches from 1he mid seventies to the mid nineties — is just a curator’s cheat code.

‘The Grunwick dispute typifies the events explored in this room,’ gushes the exhibition commentary; ‘it was led by an activist whose intersecting identities were the root of her cause.’ Here, past struggles are being retrofitted to suit contemporary dogma. This is the same casual ahistoricism that licensed 2010s era BBC Four punk documentaries to use footage from the winter of discontent as a visual accompaniment to the music of the Sex Pistols, or teleport back ‘Punk’s not dead’ style mohicans to the middle of 1976, and that stuff spreads like mould.

The panel introducing Paul Seawright’s haunting images of Irish sectarian murder sites informs us that ‘The violent, ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland lasted from 1968 to 1998.’ To fully unpack how many things are wrong with that sentence would require a short book, not a few lines in an article, but Oliver Cromwell certainly has cause to lament his erasure from history (as, for different reasons, does Diana Spencer, who somehow failed to make the cut in an exhibition about photographing the Britain of the 1980s).

In curatorial terms, The 80s: Photographing Britain is not so much a curate’s egg as a dog’s breakfast. The thrilling momentum of the early rooms quickly dissipates as valid points about representation and re-contextualisation are laboured to a level of extreme self-indulgence, and the exhibition seems to circle back around itself, with valuable late seventies material from Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon’s ground-breaking Handsworth Self Portraits project (wherein participants were given the freedom of their own shutter release) mystifyingly following on from a lengthy and unmediated rehearsal of a later schism between the GLC’s Race Equality Unit and those seeking to ‘free black photographers from the burden of representation.’

Creative Camera magazine’s eye-catching December 1985 assertion that ‘from today, black and white is dead’ sets up one of this show’s most enduring storylines, as technical advances in colour negative film broaden photographers’ palettes at a moment of profound social rupture. Although reports of monochrome’s demise turned out to have been greatly exaggerated, Paul Graham’s echoing DHSS waiting rooms and Anna Fox’s mesmerisingly claustrophobic depictions of London office life are two examples of the nightmare of Thatcher’s Britain being successfully dreamed in colour.

Sadly, by the time you get to the horribly botched final room, ‘Celebrating Subcultures’ — in which the open goal of the 1980s style press yawns, only for the ball to be launched high into the stands with a wall of Wolfgang Tillmans pictures shot entirely outside of the UK — this exhibition’s whole aesthetic framework has collapsed under the weight of its own bullshit. But oh, there is so much beauty amid the ruins.