CHANGES FOR THE BETTER

The end of the Second World War brought enormous social and economic change to Britain. By this point, photography was commonplace in daily life, widely used by people across the board. Photographs captured how the country readjusted to normality after the end of a global conflict; the economic boom and demographic shifts of the 1950s and 1960s; and the motions through modernity, postmodernity and ‘digitality’ in the later 20th century.

In the 1940s and 1950s, photographic technologies continued to advance, and photography became increasingly accessible. Colour photography, in particular, experienced huge uptake having been commercially available since the mid-1930s. At the same time, class systems that had propped up British society for centuries were challenged, and photography played an important role in capturing polarised experiences of British life. Trying to understand the varied contexts of