What was the middle class in 1980s Britain? In our contemporary moment of ever-widening wealth and social inequality, the question seems worth posing anew. In a series of documentary projects produced throughout the long 1980s, Martin Parr pictured the social habits and, above all, the tastes of Britain’s middle classes. Parr’s resolute focus on this contested social formation presents a unique problem for documentary’s historical connection to social democratic politics, a problem exacerbated by Thatcherism’s concurrent undoing of Britain’s social welfare state. This lecture will seek to clarify some of the political ambiguities of “middle-class taste” as found in projects like The Cost of Living and Signs of the Times, while also situating their interventions within the larger documentary tradition. Doing so will shed light on the connections between documentary, neoliberalism, and the wealth and social inequality of today. 

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Samuel Dylan Ewing is an art historian and curator who specializes in the history of photography. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of documentary, radical politics, and pedagogy, and is inflected by his multi-year experience as a union organizer. His writing has appeared in The History of Photography and American Art, with exhibitions staged at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.