Now, some of those shots are taking their place in a major Tate exhibition examining the creativity and rebellion that transformed 1990s Britain. On a bright afternoon in Bradford, shoppers moved through the city centre carrying bags, going about their day. Behind a nearby doorway, another side of Bradford was pulsing to a very different rhythm.
Tim Smith remembers stepping out of a small nightclub beneath the Alhambra theatre after spending hours photographing a "daytimers" disco. "I walked out into this bright sunshine and there's all these people walking about with their shopping bags, completely oblivious to what was going on just the other side of this somewhat anonymous-looking doorway," he recalls. More than three decades later, images Smith took inside that hidden world are making another unlikely journey, from Bradford's underground daytimers scene to the Tate Britain art gallery.
His photographs feature in new showcase The 90s: Art and Fashion, which opens on Thursday. Curated by former Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful, it brings together more than 100 works by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers to examine a decade of creativity and rebellion. For Smith, who lived in Bradford for more than 40 years, the inclusion of his photos is also recognition that some of the cultural shifts reshaping 1990s Britain were happening far beyond London.
"I'm pleased because I think there's a big shout-out for Bradford," he says. "These culturally significant moments of that time weren't just happening in London and Manchester, like many media people like to think they were." Smith arrived in Bradford in the mid-1980s after studying photography in Newport. A nomadic childhood and life among migrant communities in Newport's Docklands had drawn him towards documenting lives beyond the mainstream.
Through the then-recently established Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, he began photographing the city's South Asian communities at work, at religious gatherings, at weddings and in their social lives. "I was quite appalled at the lack of any kind of documentation of Bradford's Asian communities beyond the stuff that you'd see in the local papers," he says. The daytimers bhangra gigs came later, after a friend told him about afternoon club events for young British Asians.
Smith's first response was simple: "What's a daytimer?" Cheap to hire while nightclubs stood empty during the day, the venues became spaces where a generation could gather and celebrate, but also shape a unique new subculture: dancing to music drawing on Punjabi and South Asian traditions but fused with contemporary British sounds. What Smith saw was not simply young people celebrating being Asian, but proudly "being British Asian". Among those he photographed was Rani Kaur, known as DJ Radical Sister, one of the pioneering women of the scene.
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