Paul Reas
From 'The Valley's Projects', 1985
Photographs would be much easier to read if you could simply read them. The CRT television mounted in this South Wales Post Office asks: "Are you daydreaming about the good old days?" The screen is branded by a state institution offering nostalgia at the exact moment that same state is destroying what people might be nostalgic for.
This photograph was taken in 1985, the year the miners' strike collapsed to defeat. The Valleys had been pummelled by Thatcher's government, both literally and ideologically. Pit closures weren't just economic policy; they were deliberate destruction of working-class power. By 1985, unemployment in Wales stood at 170,000, roughly 13% of the working population. The Post Office had become the site where people collected state benefits, where the government's dual role as destroyer and reluctant provider played out in fluorescent-lit queues.
No one in this photograph is smiling. No one appears to be posting anything. They're waiting to collect. But everyone is immaculately turned out: coats, scarves, proper hats. This isn't incidental. It's resistance through respectability, a refusal to be reduced to Thatcherite caricatures of the undeserving poor. The dignity in this queue is deliberate and hard-won.
The television's question isn't neutral. "Are you daydreaming about the good old days?" posed to people whose communities are being systematically dismantled, becomes institutional cruelty. The chirpy font, the bright screen, the invitation to nostalgia: all of it colludes in a kind of violence. The state asks you to remember better times while ensuring those times can never return. Thatcherism weaponized nostalgia, invoking Victorian values while destroying the industrial base that built Victorian Britain. This screen performs that contradiction perfectly.
Reas captures what J.G. Ballard called "the ruins of the recent past." The CRT monitor, the institutional beige, the drop ceiling: modernity producing instant obsolescence. The good old days are already unreachable, mediated through failing technology in a space designed to process the aftermath of political war.
Looking at this photograph forty years later, the question remains relevant. If you're daydreaming about the good old days, there's probably somewhere you'd rather be. The difference is that in 1985, people knew exactly who had taken that possibility away.
Title: From 'The Valley's Projects', 1985 Copyright: © Paul Reas / Courtesy Martin Parr Foundation
Paul Reas (b. 1955) is a British documentary photographer known for his sardonic examinations of consumer culture and post-industrial Britain. 'The Valley's Projects' documented life in the South Wales Valleys during the aftermath of the 1984-85 miners' strike.
More on Reas: Martin Parr Foundation | British Library
