Paul Reas
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).
[4] 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;[6] and to using a flashgun.
[6] 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.
"[4] 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.
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.
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".
[2] 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.
"[4] Robert Clark writes in The Guardian: Reas has an eye for themes that reveal a prevailing air of social disillusionment and cultural vacuity.
