Paul Reas

Life and career

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. (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, 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. 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.

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. For a period 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 assistant with a boom mounted flashgun); portraits; cans of incense intended to provide 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 work that "I would say I photograph people but I think the pictures are more about systems people find themselves in, people shopping in supermarkets, but it’s about consumerism and how we are caught up in that. I never set anything up. Everything I photograph is as it happens".

As well as consumerism, Reas has also been concerned with politics, Americanisation, the heritage industry, gender politics and how northern working-class people are historically represented. His work is usually biographical.

In 1993, Reas began a series, Portrait of an Invisible Man, that examined the mystery of his distant 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 life 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 on a grand scale."

Williams writes that Reas's work of the early 1990s "assume a documentary stance, but they are essentially polemical." Robert Clark writes in The Guardian:

Reas has an eye for themes that reveal a prevailing air of social disillusionment and cultural vacuity. As traditional industry disappears, we see the emergence of assembly-line technologies. The architectural identity of towns dissolve to make way for out-of-town shopping malls. Heritage-industry theme parks indulge in a politically dubious nostalgia as the London property boom explodes. On the face of it it’s unrelentingly grim. Yet Reas populates such scenes with real characters, replete with poker-faced humour and shrugging defiance."

Photobooks by Reas

Other publications

Solo exhibitions

Joint exhibitions

Awards

Collection

Reas's work is held in the following public collection: