Where did all the working-class photographers go? That was the question posed by Johny Pitts when he started curating After The End Of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024. The answer came in images by a diverse array of more than 25 artists who comprise the exhibition. As the show arrives in Edinburgh from the Hayward Gallery as part of a UK tour, it highlights an often-overlooked era in British photography.

‘As a kid, I started to see the old world disappear and this new world ushered in by neo-liberal capitalism,’ says Pitts, who draws the title of the exhibition from American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s much-discussed 1992 book, The End Of History And The Last Man. ‘On the one hand there was the complete destruction of working-class community, but then there was this kind of resurrection of it through capitalist consumption. Yet what lingers are the ghosts of a working-class culture, and even within that framework that is anti-working class, a kind of working-class identity and solidarity emerge.’

Exhibition highlights include Richard Billingham’s warts-and-all studies of his family, Elaine Constantine’s image of a northern-soul dancer in motion, and Kavi Pujara’s ode to Leicester’s Hindu community. ‘I’m hoping that this show can give a little appraisal of the last 30 to 35 years,’ says Pitts, ‘and help show what was done to the working classes, where we might have gone off the trail, but also where there have been moments of connection and where working-class communities have built something. As the world seems to be falling apart, this is trying to show a different end of history.’

After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024, Stills, Edinburgh, until Saturday 28 June.