The photograph was taken on Parliament Hill, close to Thatcher’s constituency of Finchley. At this stage in her career, Moon was sufficiently well known and well respected to be able to state her preferences. She always worked in black and white, although from this period onwards other photographers were experimenting with colour news photography, and The Times newspaper started to publish a colour supplement from 1982.

Here, Thatcher is shown half-laughing, looking slightly to the side of the camera, as a scarf knotted at her throat flutters upwards in the wind. When this image was published, it was with the cover line Margaret Thatcher: which way is the wind blowing for the first woman in charge? Gossip at the time suggested that Thatcher did not like the portrait and dismissed it as being ‘unstatesmanlike’. The other photographs that accompany the article, also taken by Moon, are much more unremarkable: the Prime Minister is seen standing straight-backed looking out over London; in conversation with a passing dog-walker, head slightly to one side. These other photographs are still tellingly Moon, though; you’ll notice the dog that the Prime Minister has not seen, appearing into the side of one shot, and the fact that the focus of the dog-walker is not, apparently, Thatcher. Rather, he is staring over her shoulder, as though waiting for the encounter to end. Moon never photographed Thatcher again.

In this section of the exhibition you’ll find more of Moon’s high-profile work – during the early 1980s it was rare for her to be commissioned for anything less than a cover shoot.

In 1979:

• It was the United Nations’ International Year of the Child

• The early part of the year was known as ‘The Winter of Discontent’: high inflation and a weak economy led to shortages, strikes and unrest

• Politician Airey Neave was killed by an IRA bomb in March

• The Yorkshire Ripper murders continued. In 1981, Peter Sutcliffe would be tried and found guilty of murdering thirteen female sex workers and attempting to murder seven more. He claimed that the voice of God had told him to kill the women

• Dame Josephine Barnes became the first woman president of the British Medical Association

• Sebastian Coe set a new world record for running a mile

• Britain’s first nudist beach, in Brighton, was given the go-ahead

• TV shows Question Time, The Antiques Roadshow, Terry and June and To the Manor Born were broadcast for the first time

• Southall Black Sisters was formed, to support all black and Asian women living in the UK

• Ridley Scott’s film Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver, was released, as was Monty Python’s Life of Brian

• Six women were acquitted in the ‘Reclaim the Night’ trials

• Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published, as was A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford, Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams