In 1987 and 1988, David Moore photographed families living on a council estate in his home city of Derby, UK. The resulting series, brought together in Pictures From The Real World, is a collection of colour documentary photographs made at a time when few serious documentary photographers worked in colour. Moore’s choice was in many ways a rebellion against the prevalent aesthetic, and also a critical response to the new political and social realities imposed by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government from 1979.

The book’s images are close and abrasive. As David Chandler comments in an essay commissioned for the book, Pictures from the Real World presents working class life as a strange blend of physical mayhem and inertia; the abrasive square frames of Moore’s camera cut into bodies and objects, much as the rooms themselves seem to struggle to contain them.

The series has a specific place in British photographic history. Its first and only showing of the photographs was in 1988, when they were selected by Martin Parr for a special edition of the magazine Creative Camera. Published in 2013 by Dewi Lewis Publishing in collaboration with London-based Here Press, this hardback has 32 pages and 18 colour plates, and appeared as a limited edition of 500 copies. The publisher notes that the book is long out of print but that a small number of copies remain, lightly marked on the cover.

The work retains a visceral energy 25 years after the event and documents a very particular time in British social and photographic history. It has been listed among Photoeye Best Photobooks 2013 and Mark Power’s Top 10 Photobooks 2013, and was covered by outlets including the Guardian, Time, American Suburb X and Conscientious. David Moore has published several books and exhibited widely. His first solo exhibition, The Velvet Arena, was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 1994 and was also published as a book. His book The Last Things (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2008) documented a never before photographed government bunker in central London.