Photographs celebrating “real life” – gritty, unadorned reality undisturbed by notions of art or beauty – are the hottest thing going these days. But are such snapshots of life really the type of thing that belongs in a gallery alongside more traditional genres? “In these unelitist times, most of us would now question the old distinction between art on the one hand and photography (and documentary film) on the other… We don’t usually look for sociological information from drawings and sculptures. But there are times of crisis when artists are commissioned to do their bit for the nation, and even before the war, in the early 1930s, Benjamin Britten, WH Auden and William Coldstream were all contributing to the documentary movement. Art was to be brought to the people, and the people into art.”