I Can Help, a title taken from badges worn by supermarket staff, is a series of thirty large colour photographs about Britain’s post-industrial consumer boom. Reas presents a penetrating view of supermarket subculture finding pure theatre in everyday situations. There is ironic and incisive observation at work in his portrayal of shopping malls, DIY stores and show houses. In common with Martin Parr, who has been investigating the patterns of middle class life for several years, Reas is working contrary to humanist traditions which have influenced British documentary practice. Reas’s work does come from a documentary tradition but this latest series moves away from the literal descriptive quality inherent in so much documentary work. Reas is concerned with the photograph as a metaphor for issues which have wider implications.
Reas says, “Buoyed by her defeat of the miners, victory in the Falklands War of 1982 and the survival of an assassination attempt in 1984, Margaret Thatcher increasingly saw herself as invincible and on the right side of history. Her neoliberal policies, faith in a free market economy and a firm belief in individualism turned British culture from a ‘we’ to a ‘me’ generation. The deregulation of the banking system meant that credit was easy to come by and consumer spending was rising fast. This growth in consumption was becoming more and more evident in Britain in the mid-1980s. The then new shopping malls, situated on the edges of cities, were the new cathedrals of consumption, and the new ‘retail parks’, with their supermarkets and furniture stores, were the parish churches. Shopping and the purchasing of an off-the-shelf lifestyle were becoming new leisure activities. In addition, ‘Thatcherism’ also encouraged home ownership. Fundamental to her idea was that government, which had built between a third and half of all homes for the previous three decades, should step back. Councils could no longer build council housing. The market would provide. Houses would be built by house builders. As a result, new large private housing estates, aimed at newly aspirational individuals, were rapidly becoming a feature of most towns and cities.”
