ABSTRACT
(First published in British Photography: Towards A Bigger Picture, Ed. Mark Haworth-Booth and Chris Titterington, Aperture, New York, 1988, pp. 31-9)
Susan Butler’s essay first appeared in Towards A Bigger Picture, which accompanied an exhibition curated by Mark Haworth-Booth at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1988. The exhibition was shown at what proved to be a pivotal point in British photography and presented the work of new colourists like Martin Parr, Anna Fox and Paul Reas together with the postmodernist works of Mari Mahr, Mitra Tabrizian and Susan Trangmar, set against the traditionalism of documentarists like Phillip Jones Griffiths, Thurston Hopkins and Edwin Smith. Butler’s text is a bold attempt to resituate British photography within a postmodernist aesthetic.
