It’s a Friday night in 1984. Melanie is 18, with a fresh perm. After a long week of work, she and her neon-clad girlfriends are getting ready to head out to the local club for a night of dancing, drinking, and flirting. Without thinking anything of it, her best friend, Jane, snaps a photograph of her with a random camera. Flash forward 40 years and Melanie’s daughter, artist Victoria Gill, uncovers a box in her childhood home containing this photograph and hundreds of others from the same year. Recently published with IDEA books, Melanie and the Miners’ Strike is Gill’s edit of those images—a technicolor time capsule from a bygone era of decades past, captured in the working-class Northern England city of Leeds.

A Google search of Northern England in the ’80s might yield a different snapshot than the one captured in Melanie and the Miners’ Strike. The book’s title refers to the miners’ strike of 1984, a real-life Orwellian plotline where miners abandoned their pits in response to the Thatcher administration’s attacks on unions in favor of a free market. The strike left much of Northern England in a state of socioeconomic deprivation, its echoes still reverberating today in the cultural gap between the North and South.

Yet in the images that make up the book, this history only colors the context. Despite the decade’s dark circumstances, the photographs show Melanie doing what any 18-year old girl would do; dressing up, partying on the weekends, sharing pints at the local pub, and laughing with her girlfriends, some boyfriends, too. And in their magenta lipstick and satin monochrome glam, Melanie and her friends make it all look so fabulous.

Many of the book’s messages are timeless: Family is sacred, the late teens are ephemeral, pain is inevitable but softened by joy and humor. Although perhaps the strongest message is one of sisterhood. “I grew up with the notion that your female friends got you through all decades of your life,” Gill writes in the book’s introduction, a concept recurring throughout her larger body of work.

Another theme central to the book, and to Gill’s practice, is that life and art happen everywhere, not just in the world’s major cities. There are millions of photobooks that could be made from boxes collecting dust in middle-of-nowhere small-town attics. Luckily, this one gets to see the light.

Ahead of the photo book’s launch at Village Books in Leeds, the up-and-coming artist speaks about sifting through her mother’s photo archive, her fascination with cultural fallout, and why the power in assigning artistic value lies in the hands of artists, not institutions.

Anabel Gullo: Can you talk a bit about how this all came together?

Victoria Gill: I’d seen pictures of my mum and her friends in the ’80s before, but when I was home for Christmas, I found these two photo boxes. My granddad had moved houses, and basically these two photo boxes that were in his loft for years had been moved under my bed in my childhood home. It was just picture after picture of ’84 and ’85, this very mid-’80s moment in Leeds.

I had so many pictures to choose from, and at first I definitely didn’t think I was going to do a book. I was just like, these pictures are good, they say something, but they’ve never been shown. And I wanted to do something with them tied to this title of ‘miners’ strike,’ because you think of Northern England during this time, which was a very bleak time, but then it’s these kids partying. It was quite easy to narrow them down, because there was no motive to take any of the pictures, so it was kind of an accident, the ones that were good.

Caption from the book reads “Those were my real nails you know!”

Anabel: The title, Melanie and the Miners’ Strike, refers to the miners’ strike of 1984. This is historically reflected back as a dark time, and these images are a counter to that. How did that play into the narrative of the book?

Victoria: It’s definitely the backdrop of Northern England, and the history of the miner strikes are still there. My granddad, my only grandparent that’s still alive, was a miner. So I grew up with the stories of him and his friends down in the pit and what that was like. And I did my A-levels at Wakefield College, which is a miner town just outside Leeds. It’s always there, but I’m particularly interested in the fallout of the cultural deprivation and the North-South divide in England.

We have such a division in the class system and everything that seems to have cultural value is based in London. That’s why I was interested in the pictures and called it ‘Miners’ Strike,’ because it’s a backdrop of what’s going on. But the pictures are just these 18 year olds partying. What does that say? And what did they not have access to? Maybe it says something about why the pictures haven’t been seen, or seen to have value before.

“Maybe that’s because it’s done in a way that was outside of a university or art school system, it’s just natural.”

Anabel: I wanted to ask about this idea of “cultural capital” that you mention in the book’s introduction. That made me think about the concept of “counterculture,” which has grown into kind of a cliché now. Do you feel that term applies here? Or do these pictures capture something else entirely?

Victoria: Interviewing my mum’s friends, everyone has different stories and versions, but I wouldn’t say that was the main narrative. I would say that these kids, my mum and her friends, left school at 16, and then they started working, and by the time they were 18, this [partying] was a crucial part of after-work and weekends and the way that they dressed was a part of that. But it was a lot more connected to the mainstream of working class Leeds, rather than pushing against the establishment. Maybe that’s because it’s done in a way that was outside of a university or art school system, it’s just natural. In the book, there’s images of my grandma or Jane’s mum taking part in the 18th birthday or the nights out. It was definitely a community feel of being still very much on Leeds’s side rather than against. I guess that’s because truly everyone in the pictures is working class. Everyone’s in the same boat.

Caption from the book reads “Rebecca still has her tiara now but her daughter broke it when she was playing dress up.”

Anabel: I read that some of the captions on the images are quotes from your mother, or from her friends in the images. To what extent was this a family project, as much as it was a personal one?

Victoria: They’re very supportive, but all my family live in Leeds, so what I do in London conceptually, to them is like, okay, Victoria’s doing another project. At first I was just like, the pictures are good, I want to take them and maybe get them scanned, and then once I realized that we were going to do the book, I obviously asked my mum. Next was the process of speaking to her best friend, who she’s still very much in contact with, and finding her old friends. The captions are from my mum, and then some of my mum’s friends mixed in there. My mum only saw the book on the night of the launch event, and she really loved it, but for her, it’s just pictures of her and her friends. It’s not an art book, she doesn’t read it that way. She just finds it fun.

Anabel: What was it like getting to know this new side of her? Whenever my mom tells me stories about life pre-motherhood, it always brings us a little bit closer.

Victoria: Yes 100%. And how people’s lives evolve, hearing stories about people living together, who went out with who. It was really important—and I think my mum did get this part, because I was the first one to go to university in my family—for people to be able to see a part of Leeds or of Northern England that they wouldn’t necessarily see otherwise, or a slice in that time. I’ve kept my accent, even though I left Leeds at 18, and I’m 27 now. It’s really important for me to be in touch with it and all my family that lives there. I’m really proud to be from Leeds and have lived in Leeds. Seeing my friends at the launch event, I think my mum felt proud for Leeds, too, like, yeah, we did have a good time, we did know what was happening a little bit.

“I’ve kept my accent, even though I left Leeds at 18. It’s really important for me to be in touch with it and all my family that lives there.”

Anabel: After living in London for a few years now, do you feel a nostalgia, or maybe a persistence of the world that’s captured in these images, either in London or in Leeds? Do you feel like this is a lost time, or is it still present in certain ways?

Victoria: I feel like the fallout is present. The closing of the mines damaged the North. So I guess on the less fun side of the nights out—I mean, northerners love a good night out, so that’s there—but the fallout of what was going on in the country at the time remains. Comparing living in London to going back home, there’s simple stuff, like how many libraries are in a certain area, and access to culture and museums and funding, that’s super present, and that’s what I’m mainly interested in. And then in terms of whose work is valued, or who sees themselves as contributing to culture, when I’m back in Leeds with my family and friends, that’s not even on the table. So I do feel like the pictures are very much of their time in that way.

Anabel: ⁠There seems to be a larger theme of lost/contraband archives in your work, like in the Show of Stolen Goods, an exhibition made up of objects stolen from past workplaces, which you curated. How does this book play into that theme for you?

Victoria: Seeing work or producing work that’s counter to what has been shown in a museum context is how this book got made. These images were taken outside of any art school or university lens and that is especially important to me—choosing to assert value over the images after finding them is like finding value in work or labour that’s outside of what we consider ‘art.’ This is important to me, not just through a class lens but it’s generally the work I find interesting—who gets to present their work in what context? Or who gets to decide what we look at and what we see value in?

Anabel: Did you have anything else you wanted to share?

Victoria: It just makes me so happy that people in America might get a little slice of Northern England.

Anabel: Thank you for letting the world see these images of your mom! She and her friends were so stylish—the hair, the bright blue eyeshadow…

Victoria: They look so fucking good!