Paul Reas

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".

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."

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.

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 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 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.

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."

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.

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.