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.
Table of Contents
- 1 Life and work
- 1.1 Canyon Interludes: Between White Water and Red Rock
- 1.2 Zucchero feat. Paul Young, Scorpions, Chris Rea, Black, Julian Lennon, Doro, German Rock Project..
- 1.3 Let Go (Vandit Club Mix by PvD)
- 1.4 Flash & The Pan, Ten Sharp, Billy Paul, Joe Satriani, Chris Rea..
- 1.5 SHIVA REA: POWER FLOW YOGA
- 1.6 A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles
- 1.7 Paulas Choice--SKIN PERFECTING 2% BHA Liquid Salicylic Acid Exfoliant--Facial Exfoliant for Blackheads, Enlarged Pores, Wrinkles & Fine Lines, 4 oz Bottle
- 1.8 Tea Tree Lavender Mint Moisturizing Shampoo, 33.8 fl. oz.
- 1.9 Shiva Rea: A.M. Energy
- 1.10 Tea Tree Special Shampoo, 33.8 fl. oz.
Life and work
Reas grew going on in a working class family upon the Buttershaw council home in Bradford. He was born and lived following four siblings in a home on Brafferton Arbor (since demolished) and was mostly raised by his mother, who furthermore worked at Baird Television Ltd. assembling televisions, or as a cleaner. (He would later recall his dad as “Only ever there on Sundays and even later a sleeping, silent figure in an armchair.”) He left Buttershaw Comprehensive aged fifteen and spent five years as an apprentice bricklayer once the unqualified of Roy W Parkin in Clayton.
He left Bradford to breakdown documentary photography at the University of Wales, Newport from 1982 to 1984. David Hurn was course head and accompanied by his tutors were Daniel Meadows, John Benton-Harris and Martin Parr. After six years as an undergraduate and later a literary photography technician, he became a freelance photographer.
Impressed first by Parr’s photography of Hebden Bridge and the play in of the Exit group (Chris Steele-Perkins, Paul Trevor and Nicholas Battye) in Survival Programmes, Reas began like humanistic, fly on the wall, documentary photography in black-and-white using a 35 mm camera. He photographed lively 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 enthusiastic in industry.[n 1] He soon moved into more sketchy photography and in colour. He was familiar of the colour photography of Paul Graham and Martin Parr, Charlie Meecham and Bob Phillips, but it was seeing the fake of North American colour photographers William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz that convinced him to bend to colour for his own statute and put him into an influential intervention of British colour documentarists including Graham and Anna Fox. He misused to a larger format camera, which allowed smaller details to be easily gate 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 as well as 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 ration of its Valleys Project to each manufacture a body of perform which “focussed on the shifting topographic landscape and the partial start 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.[n 2]
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 loose 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 lineage business, taking issue with what he judged to be the cynical re-writing of the in the look of of British practicing 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. For a mature he worked as an advertising photographer for clients such as BT and Volkswagen.
He taught at the Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton, from 1993 to 1998. He is course leader of documentary photography at the University of Wales, Newport.
In 2011/2012 Reas completed From a Distance, a year-long commission on the regeneration of the Elephant and Castle in South London, part of The Elephant Vanishes project, directed by Patrick Sutherland, for London College of Communication. He photographed people candidly, showing fraught and tense emotions (with the aid of an accomplice with a boom mounted flashgun); portraits; cans of incense meant to have enough money help under specific social pressures; and discarded furniture. The photographs were exhibited in 2012 and published by Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) in Fieldstudy 16: From a Distance.
Reas has said of his perform that “I would say I photograph people but I think the pictures are more very nearly systems people locate themselves in, people shopping in supermarkets, but it’s practically consumerism and how we are caught going on in that. I never set anything up. Everything I photograph is as it happens”.
As without difficulty as consumerism, Reas has after that been concerned as soon as politics, Americanisation, the lineage industry, gender politics and how northern working-class people are historically represented. His pretend is usually biographical.
In 1993, Reas began a series, Portrait of an Invisible Man, that examined the secrecy of his absentminded and mostly absent father “by photographing the microcosm which a child observes in the macrocosm of home”. The curators of an exhibition at the Barbican wrote of this series: “Paul Reas’s meticulously constructed descriptions of domestic simulation may perhaps exorcise demons, the ghouls and goblins which inhabit a child’s imagination; they are photography as remedy, as exhumation and a personal adventure upon a grand scale.”
Williams writes that Reas’s enactment of the to come 1990s “assume a documentary stance, but they are in point toward of fact polemical.” Robert Clark writes in The Guardian:
Last update 2021-08-06