Wide Angle View at Tate Liverpool & RIBA North
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Wide Angle View
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In 1969, the Architectural Review magazine launched the Manplan series, a radical photographic survey of Britain’s built environment. While produced for an architecture magazine, the black and white, reportage-style photography often focuses less on buildings than on people’s experience of buildings – little girls careering around concrete council estates with toy prams, a lonely-looking woman peering out the window of an old people’s hostel. You could call it a social study as much as an architectural one, highlighting many still-relevant social issues like inadequate housing and loneliness.
The radical nature of the series was largely down to the magazine commissioning street photographers more interested in people than anything else. Among them were Ian Berry, Patrick Ward, and Tony Ray-Jones, whose departure from conventional architectural photography helped reframe conversations on urban development, bringing attention to socially conscious design within the built environment.
The touring exhibition Wide-Angle View brings 80 of these original photographs to Liverpool, at RIBA North, currently also home to a temporarily relocated Tate Liverpool. Half a century on from their publication, they’re still powerful and all the more so because many of the social issues they capture are as – sometimes even more – pervasive today.
It’s a celebration both of the original series itself, and of photography’s argumentative power.
