When the English poet Phillip Larkin spoke in 1964 of “the fathers with broad belts under their suits / And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat,” he soured our perception of mankind. No longer can one walk down the street in ignorance. Instead, upon entering the public sphere, every flaw of every human becomes aggressively obvious. Larkin’s voice of disgust rings in the ear, forcing acknowledgement of the blemished, of the vulgar, of the heinous fractures in our social fabric.

“His series has the camera-man become the examiner, and the human individual his specimen”

There is something of Larkin’s ruthless exposure of the ugly in the photography of Charles H. Traub. His series, Lunchtime, shot between 1977 and 1980, has the camera-man become the examiner, and the human individual his specimen, who is put under the microscope for close inspection. Amongst the bustling lunch hour of the city, Traub took to the streets of New York, Chicago, and Milan, capturing unsuspecting victims as they crawl around in their natural habitat. Portraits of ordinary folk, coloured in the vibrant palette of the period, become humorous satires lifted straight out of the lines of a Larkin poem. Oversized glasses teetering on the edge of ridiculousness, women caked in make-up, brows enlarged, and lips plastered on, with beehive hair backcombed and pinned, nails talon-like: the result is a gaudy display, what Traub called “the passing parade of the street”.

All that which made Larkin sneer at the superficiality of the “grinning and pomaded, girls / In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, / All posed irresolutely,” Traub shows to be true. The polyester nightmare of the 70s is augmented: nylon sweaters, hair so stiff a hammer couldn’t crack it, myriad outfits of pink head to toe.

And it is not just the synthetic garb of the time which Traub’s camera betrays. Equally exposed is the state of nature which lies underneath these costumes. The elderly, their skin wrinkled, leathered and smattered with age spots from the sun. Grins revealing crooked teeth, yellowed and protruding. Those verging on obesity, topless in a deck chair. Traub’s up-close angles, attacking from underneath double-chins or zoomed in on a particularly prominent nose, are merciless. Some of his subjects don’t quite register the camera, caught mid-blink or eyes askew; others fashion themselves into porcelain figures, posed in a pout. A few unfortunate victims are entirely unaware: one woman is caught asleep, mouth wide open.

“Equally exposed is the state of nature which lies underneath these costumes”

Surprising, then, are the impressions which Traub formed of society’s relationship to the camera. His assertion that “everybody wants to be photographed. Everybody wants to be treated that way” not only suggests a comfortability or ease with the experience of having a lens shoved in one’s face, but a magnetism towards the camera. His subjects, Traub believed, rather than being repelled by the truth-baring flaws which the camera exposed, were seduced by its allure. Traub even described occasions where celebrities, from Jackie Kennedy to John and Yoko, approached him in the street, assuming that he was there to take their photo, and appearing prepared to submit themselves to his lens.

The story, however, seems different for our current, arguably more self-conscious, society. The subjects of Traub’s camera are “all posed irresolutely,” yet there seems to be a greater authenticity to this epoch of photography, especially when compared to the modern-day falsities of the selfie, assembled with ring-light and all. No longer able to be caught off guard in a society so attentive to public perception, the camera has mutated from a tool of naturalism to one of photographic proof: evidence of where one was, what one did, and whom they were with.

The photographer’s effort to capture the unflattering – to trap defects of humanity ‘warts and all’ in the transience of a photograph – is one which we appear to have developed an aversion towards. One could go as far as to diagnose this generation, the children of technology, with a photographic phobia: a fear of being violated by the scrutiny of the camera. Externalised through this phobia is a pervasive language of disgust; words like ‘cringe’ and ‘ick’, modern terminology to describe the repulsiveness of a bad photograph of someone, are not only words of resistance, but of violent aversion.

Perhaps the sheer prevalence of the lens is to blame: degrading shots now being available to anyone with the iPhone’s 0.5x feature. Or maybe it is the sharpened need to prove oneself as a flagbearer of photogenicity in a world of airbrush and editing. A more cynical perspective might argue the intensity of this critical lens to be nothing more than a vanity: an obsession with the self, slowly fermented in the enclosed environment of our hyper-vigilant society. Either way, there is an indubitable, and scarily increasing, resistance to deformities and distortions – ones which creatives like Larkin and Traub were so eager to expose.