Paul Reas

Paul Reas (born 1955) is a British social documentary photographer and university lecturer. He is best known for photographing consumerism in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.

Reas has produced the books ''I Can Help'' (1988), ''Flogging a Dead Horse: Heritage Culture and Its Role in Post-industrial Britain'' (1993) and ''Fables of Faubus'' (2018). He has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery and London College of Communication, London; Cornerhouse, Manchester; and Impressions Gallery, Bradford. His work is held in the collection of the British Council.

Life and work

Reas grew up in a working class family on the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford. He was born and lived with four siblings in a house on Brafferton Arbor (since demolished) and was mostly raised by his mother, who also worked at Baird Television Ltd. assembling televisions, or as a cleaner.Val Williams, Carol Brown and Brigitte Lardinois, eds, ''Who's Looking at the Family?'' (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1994), pp. 38–39. (He would later remember his father as "Only ever there on Sundays and even then a sleeping, silent figure in an armchair.") He left Buttershaw Comprehensive aged fifteen and spent five years as an apprentice bricklayer with the firm of Roy W Parkin in Clayton.

He left Bradford to study documentary photography at the University of Wales, Newport from 1982 to 1984. David Hurn was course head and among his tutors were Daniel Meadows, John Benton-Harris and Martin Parr. After six years as an undergraduate and then a college photography technician, he became a freelance photographer.

Impressed first by Parr's photography of Hebden Bridge and the work of the Exit group ( Chris Steele-Perkins, Paul Trevor and Nicholas Battye) in ''Survival Programmes'',Val Williams, "Elegies revisited: Photographs by Paul Reas 1985–1993", in Paul Reas and Stuart Cosgrave, ''Flogging a Dead Horse: Heritage Culture and Its Role in Post-Industrial Britain'' (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1993). Reas began with humanistic, fly on the wall, documentary photography in black-and-white using a 35 mm camera. He photographed working people, taking inspiration from both August Sander and Lee Friedlander's portrayal of working people, that he considered gave them the grace and dignity he experienced working in industry.As seen in Sander's ''People of the 20th Century'' series and Friedlander's ''Lee Friedlander at Work'' (2002). Reas in particular cites Sander's photograph of a hod carrier (a bricklayer) from 1928. He soon moved into more subjective photography and in colour. He was aware of the colour photography of Paul Graham and Martin Parr, Charlie Meecham and Bob Phillips, but it was seeing the work of North American colour photographers William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz that convinced him to change to colour for his own work and put him into an influential group of British colour documentarists including Graham and Anna Fox. He changed to a larger format camera, which allowed smaller details to be easily read and understood, not requiring the bold graphic statements he considered necessary with 35 mm; and to using a flashgun.

As influences and inspirations, Reas has also cited David Byrne and Talking Heads, and northern soul.

In 1985 he and Ron McCormick were the first photographers commissioned by Ffotogallery in Wales as part of its ''Valleys Project'' to each produce a body of work which "focussed on the changing topographic landscape and the partial introduction of new technology into a latter day industrial wasteland". Other photographers commissioned were David Bailey, Mike Berry, John Davies, Peter Fraser, Francesca Odell, Roger Tiley and William Tsui.A resource on the Valleys Project is availabl
here
(PDF) within Ffotogallery's website.

Reas's first book, ''I Can Help,'' shows supermarkets, superstores and the like, photographed from 1985 to 1988. Val Williams writes that "The people who Reas photographed emerged from its pages . . . as lost souls, modern Ancient Mariners adrift in an ocean of endless choices." The photographs (1989–1993) in his second book, ''Flogging a Dead Horse'', "explored the rise of the heritage business, taking issue with what he judged to be the cynical re-writing of the past of British working people by the leisure industry"; they are "edgy, viciously satirical comments on our appetite for vicarious experience."

Reas worked commercially as an editorial photographer for ''The Sunday Times Magazine'', ''The Observer'' and the BBC
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