Pictures from the Real World (Colour photographs) 1987-88

Pictures from the Real World is a set of colour photographs of families on a council estate in David Moore’s home city of Derby, made in 1987 and 1988 and first seen in print in Creative Camera in 1988.

Moore completed the pictures as a final-year BA student, and Martin Parr selected them for a special edition of the magazine. Few serious documentary photographers were working in colour at the time, and the publisher reads Moore’s choice as a rebellion against the prevailing aesthetic and a response to Thatcher-era politics. Dewi Lewis Publishing and Here Press brought the work out as a book in 2013, in an edition of 500: 32 pages, 18 colour photographs, a paper-case hardback with a foil title. David Chandler contributed a new essay, describing working-class life in the pictures as a blend of “physical mayhem and inertia.”

Moore’s first solo exhibition, The Velvet Arena, was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 1994 and was also published as a book. He is Course Leader on the MA Photography at Central Saint Martins.