At the end of the 1980s, Paul Reas found himself photographing the only growth industry in northern England: heritage. Pictures such as this one, taken in the reconstructed drift mine at the Beamish open-air museum in County Durham, were part of a project he called Flogging a Dead Horse. There was anger in these photographs. They were intended, Reas said, to be a “bitter and ironic rebuke to those who were appropriating working-class history, with all its hardships, and making it into entertainment”.
Fables of Faubus, a new book that includes four decades of Reas’s pictures of Britain, puts that rebuke into context. Reas grew up on the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford, made infamous by the film Rita, Sue and Bob Too. He was apprenticed as a bricklayer in the late 1970s before, inspired by the northern soul club scene and the excitement of seeing American documentary photography, he picked up a camera and headed to art college.
The first subjects he was drawn to were working men, the characters he recognised from his years on building sites. In 1983, he produced a series of remarkable black-and-white portraits of miners in south Wales, not realising that within two years the world he had witnessed would be largely shut down and dismantled.
Almost immediately, sanitised versions of that world were being reconstructed and sold as Sunday afternoon days out. The Big Pit National Coal Museum in south Wales, where Reas also photographed, opened as local collieries were being closed. The drift mine at Beamish, staffed partly by redundant miners, invited visitors to “experience the reality of life underground”. It was not a reality that Reas recognised, but his pictures capture that pivotal moment, when, in a few short years, two centuries of industry became history.
Fables of Faubus by Paul Reas is published next month (Gost, £35)
