This new gothic-themed exhibition has lots to show photographers about making the strange really feel unsettling

You do not want a haunted home to make {a photograph} really feel haunted. That’s the lesson buried inside Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic, a brand new exhibition opening on the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, England, on September 17 and operating till December 20.

Curator Isaac Blease has pulled collectively greater than 80 years of British documentary work, a lot of it drawn from the Foundation’s personal archive of over 5,000 prints.

It consists of pictures by Kjell-Åke Andersson, Bill Brandt, Anna Fox, Robert Frank, Don McCullin, Lee Miller, John Myers, Akihiko Okamura, Sue Packer, Charlie Philips, Sarah Pickering, Alice Poyzer, Jo Spence, Janine Wiedel and Donovan Wylie among others.

All this material makes the case, quite brilliantly, that unease has been baked into the genre from the start. And for anyone who shoots documentary or street photography, that’s something worth thinking about.

No body, no blood

Here’s just one example. John Myers’ The Bed (1976) is, on paper, a photograph of an unmade bed with a dark, wave-patterned throw. There’s no body, no blood, no drama. Yet it reads like a crime scene waiting to happen, purely through composition, tonal weight and the photographer’s refusal to explain himself.

That restraint is the whole trick, and it’s one worth studying rather than admiring from a distance. It’s a topic that, quite frankly, couldn’t be more timely.

“Interest in the Gothic resurfaces during times of uncertainty,” Blease points out. “And documentary photography itself is in a dark moment, with its purpose and role in question, public distrust of ‘photographers’, and the existential threat posed by AI.”

Split into four chapters (The Castle, Domestic Bliss, Double Take and Night Creatures), the show leans hard on the idea that horror lives closest to home.

For instance, Janine Wiedel and Kjell-Åke Andersson’s images of British heavy industry, molten iron pouring in the dark in Shelter from the Heat / Molten Iron, Shelton Bar, don’t need staging to feel gothic; the subject matter does the work.

Anna Fox’s Pete’s Food and Flowers, meanwhile, turns a plate of grilled tomatoes into something closer to a wound, using nothing more than color and a floral border plate to suggest the domestic aftermath of trauma.

What’s striking is how little of this depends on technical trickery. It’s about editing choices: cropping tight, holding back context, letting a caption (or its absence) do heavy lifting.

For example, Sarah Pickering’s Boots – an eerily-lit, empty former shop interior shot for her series Incident – works because it withholds narrative rather than supplying one.

This all teaches us something, too, about genre snobbery. Documentary photography likes to think of itself as sober and evidentiary, while gothic imagery gets filed under fiction and excess.

But as this exhibition shows, they’re more alike than you might think. Peter Mitchell’s abandoned Leeds villa, Don McCullin’s industrial landscapes, Donovan Wylie’s clinical prison cells at the Maze… none of this is supernatural. Yet all of it unsettles.

For anyone wondering how to make your subjects feel charged with meaning, without resorting to gimmicks, this is close to a syllabus. Look at what you’re leaving out of frame. Trust low light and stillness over spectacle. And above all remember: the most disquieting image in the room might simply be a wardrobe, a kettle or a bed.

Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic runs at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, from September 17 to December 20, 2026. Entry is free.

You may additionally like…

If you are all for documentary capturing, the best cameras for street photography along with the best lenses for street photography and reportage are a good place to start.