Title: Creating a collaborative Worktown archive : photography, place and community
Abstract: This practice-based thesis uses photography as a method to examine how photographic
archives constitute community. It develops a case study of the Worktown photographs,
which were taken by Humphrey Spender during Mass Observation’s experimental study of
everyday life in Bolton, Lancashire, 1937 -1938, and are now held as part of Bolton Museum’s
Worktown archive.
As ‘old’ photographs, the Worktown photographs prompt nostalgia for an idealised
community of the past, destroyed through the decline of industry. In academic contexts
they have been critiqued as exemplary social documentary photographs, ideologically
charged visual representations of working class life which construct history as a false
national memory of community and consensus. Here, I argue that this critical narrative
of photographic subjugation has limited the productive potential of the Worktown
photographs, and ask instead what understandings arise if we consider the photographs as
material objects which constitute community in relation to place.
This theoretical perspective, derived from contemporary practices of visual and sensory
anthropology, informs the practical investigation and reinterpretation of Mass Observation’s
experimental use of photographic and creative research methods at the intersection of art
and anthropology. By responding to this archive in collaboration with local communities,
I demonstrate that processes of taking, documenting, sharing and photographs generate
new meaning in relation to the contingencies of place. In this way photography may
be understood as an experiential form of knowledge, and the photographic archive
is reactivated as an active medium creating new understandings of past and present
communities.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-05-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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