There is a kind of poetic justice to the timing of the publication of David Moore's Pictures from the Real World – it coincides with the death of its spectral presence, Margaret Thatcher. Though there are no photographs of her in the book, she haunts it all the same, not least in Moore's documenting of the beginnings of the dramatic social slippage she engendered from working class to underclass – the inverse of all the much-vaunted aspiration and individualism that so defined Thatcherism in the 80s.
Living in Derby in 1986, Moore took the notion of the insider photographer one stage further when he began knocking on the doors of houses on a council estate and asking if he could take pictures of the inhabitant's living rooms, kitchens, even bedrooms. Surprisingly perhaps, many said yes, and a hybrid style was born in which documentary rubs up against an intimacy that stops just short of intrusion. That it does stop is down to Moore's social conscience, which is on the side of the marginalised whose lives, under Thatcher, were rapidly becoming more precarious – and have remained so ever since. You could say that Moore's photographs record the the beginnings of a new social class recently dubbed the precariat.
As David Chandler points out in his essay for the book, Moore belonged to "the second wave of new colour documentary in Britain", having attended Farnham College of Art and Design, where he was taught by practitioners from the first wave including Martin Parr and Paul Graham. His degree show work was chosen by Parr for a feature in the magazine Creative Camera in 1988 – and you can see why Parr was so taken with their mixture of edginess, social responsibility and in-your-face intimacy bordering on voyeurism. In rich hues, Moore records peeling wallpaper and grubby cookers, cluttered rooms and gaggles of bored children. A tattooed man lifts weights in the only space in a bedroom that's not piled with clothes. A poster for a wrestling bout at Derby Assembly Rooms, featuring Big Daddy and King Kendo, is tacked to a door between two wallpapered walls whose colours clash so violently you can almost hear it. A woman slumps bored before a TV set, her living room carpet and curtains a dizzying swirl of browns, reds and muddy yellows. Beside her, the remains of a meal sits incongruously on a table covered with a white lace tablecloth. Moore's eye for telling detail is acute and his pictures possess an inferred energy that, as Chandler notes, "presents working-class life as a strange blend of physical mayhem and inertia".
The book is subtitled Colour Photographs from 1987-1988. Though that may seem self-explanatory, it signals both a stance and a mastery of the still-emergent form that, even in the late 80s, was viewed with suspicion by the purists of British documentary photography. Moore is such a master of colour that he made me think more than once what William Eggleston's photographs would have looked like had he been born in the north of England rather than the American south. Some of this has to do with Moore's odd perspectives, which can make images look like they have been taken from floor level. Then there's the severe cropping that often creates a tantalising suggestion of something else – another photograph happening just beyond the frame. The end results can be mischievous or mysterious. What kind of person reads a thick black bible by a steaming saucepan in a cluttered kitchen while a curious toddler peers upwards from behind a makeshift curtain?
Published jointly by Dewi Lewis and newcomers Here Press, Moore's Pictures from the Real World have taken a long time to surface in book form – but they look all the more powerful for that. They seem poised between one form of documentary and another, a pivotal place where social realism meets an altogether more provocative approach characterised by bold colours and the white-light flash of a relentlessly prowling camera. What emerges is a world all too real in its veracity – and almost unreal in its intensity.
Now see this
Next week sees the opening of the annual Deutsche Börse photography prize shortlist exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery in London, featuring recent work by Mishka Henner, Cristina de Middel, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and Chris Killip. Also on show will be Claire Aho: Studio Works, a chance to see images by one of the pioneers of Finnish colour and fashion photography. Both shows open to the public on Friday 19 April.
The excellent Daylight photograph magazine has just launched its 2013 Daylight photo awards and is inviting entries from around the globe. The guideline is short and to the point: "We will consider still images made from all photographic processes, both traditional and digital. You should demonstrate the ability to build a strong series of images and a cohesive body of work." Closing date for entries is 1 May.
