From the "blurb" :
"SURVIVAL PROGRAMMES presents simply and vividly the existing situation in Britain's inner cities. It documents the scale and complexity of inner city deprivation — and the different responses to it — in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast.
The experience is communicated in the form of a photographic and verbal record. The photographs provide a narrative sequence and can be 'read' independently of the text, which is from tape-recordings of people speaking from their own experience. The two narratives develop independently yet in parallel. The unfolding relationship of image and text is complex, uneven, revealing and open to many different interpretations."
"The pictures are outstandingly good. The dominant impression of poverty, futility, despondency, purposelessness and environmental decay is genuinely moving, as is the sense of love and residual human dignity in the midst of the undoubted hardship . . . "
Exit Photography Group: Nicholas Battye , Chris Steele-Perkins, Paul Trevor.