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Rachel and Gaye Bell – The Twinsets, 1981. Made in 1981, it is the kind of image that turns a date in a history book into something you can actually see.
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By the 1980s the modern media landscape was taking shape: cable television, personal computers, and global brands. Film photography was at its technical height, just a generation before digital cameras would change everything.
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Pictures of ordinary life are some of the most valuable historical documents we have. Grand events were always going to be recorded, but a normal day — how people worked, dressed, shopped, and passed the time — survives only when someone happened to point a camera at it.
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