Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Photography
Longing for the past
A research paper on how the lens-based depiction of the 1980s music industry shaped the collective memory of that decade
By analysing how the camera captured the Western music industry of the 1980s, the research paper Longing for the past examines how that decade is collectively perceived nowadays. The goal is to understand what aspects of the ‘80s we remember and how these depictions are translated and read decades later. Along the way, this paper seeks to determine why the ‘80s are having a comeback in contemporary pop culture; therefore, it also inquires into trend cycles, the romanticisation of the past and how correctly it can be recreated.
Through historical research, especially on the music industry and photography of the ‘60s and the ‘70s, the musicians’ urgency and its visualisation in the 1980s are first put into context. Further, technological innovations, such as the rise of MTV (Music Television) and the music video, as well as the power of cover art and, ultimately, its fall, are dissected. By subsequently looking at political and sociocultural motivations of ‘80s music, this research paper investigates how far these can be translated accurately as this very art is brought back to the mainstream decades later. The findings within this research conclude that the modern image of the 1980s is a massive scam on our memory and, therewith, on contemporary mainstream culture.
What made a comeback is not the ‘80s style per se, but an illusion, initially genuinely crafted by nostalgic artists and, ultimately, cleverly tailored by companies to serve their products to the masses with an ‘old but desirable’-stamp. This retro-marketing, paired with the phenomenon of Retrieval- induced forgetting and social dilemmas, provides a lucrative platform for escapism and results in the meaning behind 1980s music being deducted. People tend to forget that the lens-based depiction of the ‘80s music industry was never meant to serve as pure documentation.
