Exit Photography Group - Photographs.

The Exit Photography Group formed in the early 1970s as a collective of photographers Nicholas Battye, Chris Steele-Perkins, and Paul Trevor working collaboratively to document the realities of British urban life. Their first major project, Down Wapping (1972–1975), focused on London’s East End and developed through sustained local engagement, recording changes in dockland communities during a period of industrial decline. The work established the group’s collective practice model, in which decisions regarding editing, sequencing, and production were made jointly, setting a foundation for their later national documentation efforts.

Building on the methodological and ethical frameworks developed through Down Wapping, the group initiated Survival Programmes (1974–1979), a major photographic and oral history survey of social conditions across the United Kingdom. The project combined monochrome images with transcribed interviews and was organised into thematic sections addressing labour, welfare, community, and resistance. Rather than acting as illustrative captions, the texts functioned as parallel narratives, reflecting the photographers’ aim to decentralise authorship and present a direct account of lived experience within a shifting economic and political landscape.

Positioned within the context of British documentary practice of the 1970s, Exit’s work represented a turn toward collective authorship and sociological inquiry. Their projects departed from both press photography and the individualistic mode of the “concerned photographer,” aligning instead with critical traditions that interrogated systems of class and representation. The group’s complete archive, now held at the London School of Economics, remains a key reference for research into post-industrial Britain and continues to inform debates on ethics, collaboration, and the politics of photographic documentation.

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