{"id":1183,"date":"2009-03-13T14:36:38","date_gmt":"2009-03-13T14:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1183"},"modified":"2009-03-13T14:44:43","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T14:44:43","slug":"no-such-thing-as-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/03\/13\/no-such-thing-as-society\/","title":{"rendered":"NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY"},"content":{"rendered":"

The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously announced that ‘There is no such thing as society’ (October 31, 1987)<\/strong><\/span>,\u00c2\u00a0 a quote which has been borrowed for the title of a relatively recent publication about British photography. No Such Thing As Society: Photography in Britiain, 1967-1987<\/a> by David Alan Mellor (Hayward Publishing, London, 2008), draws from the collections of the Arts Council and the British Council to give an appraisal of these two turbulent decades.<\/p>\n

\"519otv5kxll_ss500_\"<\/div>\n
Book cover featuring photograph by Daniel Meadows<\/div>\n
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The early 1970s saw the emergence of new and independent approaches to documentary photography which focused on social realism. The leading exponent, Tony Ray-Jones<\/a>, captured the comedies of social class and the absurdities of human behaviour within the constraints of British culture. The human costs of de-industrialisation and globalisation were the great central themes of the documentary photographers active in the North of England in the late 70s and 80s. The social disasters captured in Chris Killip’s<\/a> work extended into the darkly coloured, claustrophobic interiors of DHSS offices photographed by Paul Graham<\/a>, and Martin Parr’s <\/a>lividly coloured documents of holiday makers in New Brighton, Liverpool. By the end of the 80s, the status of photography within the artistic context had been established. Motifs of intense political dissatisfaction spread across the urban vistas of Ian Dobbie, while more conventional forms of photo-journalism of urban conflict in the North of Ireland and the streets of South London were employed by Philip Jones-Griffith and Paul Graham.<\/p>\n

\"Beauty<\/div>\n

Beauty Contest, Southport \u00c2\u00a9 Tony Ray-Jones, 1967. British Council Collection, London.<\/p><\/div>\n

No Such Thing As Society<\/em> has been curated by David Alan Mellor<\/a>, Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. He has written and curated extensively on aspects of post-war British art and photography, including Antonioni’s Blow-Up, London 1966 (2006), Liliane Lijn, Works, 1958-1980 (2005), Interpreting Lucian Freud (2003), and The Art of Robyn Denny (2002).<\/p>\n

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\"Emma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s<\/div>\n

Emma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Wedding \u00c2\u00a9 David Butterworth, 2007.\u00c2\u00a0 Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre.<\/p>\n

Artists included in the book are-<\/div>\n
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Keith Arnatt, John Benton Harris, Ian Berry, Derek Boshier, Victor Burgin, Vanley Burke, David Butterworth, David Chadwick, Tarik Chawdry, John Davies, Ian Dobbie, Peter Fraser, Gilbert & George, Paul Graham, Brian Griffin, Christine Hobbeheydar, Cragie Horsfield, Alexis Hunter, Phillip Jones-Griffiths, Chris Killip, Bob Long, Mark\u00c3\u00a9ta Luskacov\u00c3\u00a1, Ron McCormick, Peter Marlow, Daniel Meadows, Peter Mitchell, Raymond Moore, Tish Murtha, Martin Parr, Gilles Peress, Tony Ray-Jones, Jurgen Schadeberg, Graham Smith, Chris Steele-Perkins, Homer Sykes, Paul Trevor.<\/p><\/div>\n

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You can read a review of the project by in Frieze here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And an interesting interview with Mellor in The Guardian here<\/a>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously announced that ‘There is no such thing as society’ (October 31, 1987),\u00c2\u00a0 a quote which has been borrowed for the title of a relatively recent publication about British photography. No Such Thing As Society: Photography in Britiain, 1967-1987 by David Alan Mellor (Hayward Publishing, London, 2008), draws from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1183"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1207,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions\/1207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}