In 1978, as trade unions organised widespread strikes and the economy fell into a period of staggering decline, the UK was barrelling towards the Winter of Discontent. With inflation rising, the Troubles in Northern Ireland escalating, and independence movements across the world in full swing it looked as though the sun had finally set on the British Empire.
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That year, German photographer Miron Zownir packed a bag and hitchhiked his way through a heavy snowstorm from Berlin via Brussels and Ostend to London. As Zownir remembers it, “After almost three years in Berlin being rejected in film school, surviving from underpaid temp jobs, feeling kind of oppressed by that grey, seemingly futureless, walled in spirit, I was open for any change and London sounded as good or better than any other city in Europe.”
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After finding a cheap flat in Earls Court, Zownir hitchhiked back to Berlin, borrowed his brother’s Volkswagen, and moved his things to London.Hailed by Terry Southern as the “Poet of Radical Photography,” Zownir embraced the emerging punk scene of the city, a distinctive mix of anarchy and utopia where the have-nots raged against the machine.
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