no such thing as society

Photograph: Daniel Meadows 1974

Tullie House, Carlisle (May 10 to July 13)

"These images tell of the human cost. The devastation they record recalls Bill Brandt's photographs of Britain in the 1930s, or the work of the crusading photojournalist WF Lestrange in the same period. The latter, in his outraged polemic Wasted Lives, toured Wales and the industrial north to ram home their deep deprivation.

Now that the mid-1970s and the early 80s have become the subject of mainstream pop nostalgia - Life On Mars, Ashes to Ashes - the work of photographers Meadows, Murtha, Ian Dobbie and others provides a corrective to these simplified retro stylings. Their impulse was documentary, and their forebears included idealistic ventures such as Mass Observation and the neue sachlichkeit ("new objectivity") of 1920s Germany."

from Jon Savage's review in The Guardian March 24 2008