“We were called spies, pryers, mass-eavesdroppers, nosey parkers, peeping-toms, lopers, snoopers, envelope-steamers, keyhole artists, sex maniacs, sissies and society playboys.”
These are the words of Humphrey Spender, speaking years after he had first turned his camera on an often reluctant British public in 1937 as part of the Mass Observation project. Founded that year by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet and journalist Charles Madge and the surrealist painter and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, Mass Observation’s aim was to study the ordinary lives of ordinary people in order to counteract the stereotypes that held sway in the British media of the time. To this end, a team of volunteer interviewers, some trained in sociology, some simply enthusiastic amateurs, went out among the people to record and analyse their everyday lives and opinions. Topics ranged from the mundane to the metaphysical – which clothes they wore to go shopping to their thoughts on the nature of happiness.
Paradoxically, though, Spender’s photographs, which are now recognised as an important part of the Mass Observation archive, were never used at the time. “The images were always there to provide a focus for the written material, which was the core of the project,” elaborates Russell Roberts, an academic who has curated an exhibition, Mass Observation: This Is Your Photo, which opens at the Photographers’ Gallery in London on 2 August. “They were purely informational and not meant to be artistic in any way. So from Spender’s photographs of a crowd at a Bolton Wanderers game, the Mass Observation researchers could count how many men were wearing hats at a football match. It was this kind of statistical detail that they collated and processed in their excavation of the everyday.”
And though he was never quite convinced of the importance of photography in chronicling everyday life, and was disillusioned by his stint as a photographer for the Daily Mirror, Spender’s images are now viewed as groundbreaking in themselves. “Historically, the main photographic moment for the project was 1937 to 1938,” says Roberts, “and it was Spender who emerged as the poet-photographer of the group, merging press photography and British documentary realism in a way that often nods to Brassaï and surrealism. He would photograph people, but also turn his camera on graffiti on a wall, or point it at the ground. As an artist he was picking up on what was in the air at the time.”
Two of Spender’s best-known series, Blackpool Illuminations and Bolton Worktown, will be shown as part of the exhibition, alongside the documentary photographs of Michael Wickham from his 1946 series Britain Can Make it. Intriguingly, the show will also include images by John Hinde, the famous postcard artist, who photographed Exmoor Village in 1947 on a commission for Mass Observation, as well as a series called Circus Life. Perhaps more revealing still are the fly-on-the-wall photographs of the Ashington Group, a coal miners’ art appreciation society created by Mass Observation in 1938.
Worthiness and philanthropy were the twin engines of the ethos of Mass Observation, which was very much an organisation of its time: left-leaning and optimistic, but with a tendency to view the working class as a kind of exotic species to be studied under an anthropological microscope. “For all their leftwing sympathies, the founders were very much children of the empire,” says Russell. “There was a sincere empathy for the working class, but they did tend to see Britain from a somewhat privileged perspective.”
The exhibition is divided into two parts, the second concentrating on snapshots submitted to Mass Observation after its relaunch in 1981, when it focused more on the individual experience and personal histories of its volunteers. These often apparently mundane photographs were returned alongside extensive written descriptions of daily life by ordinary people who responded to topics such as “The Garden and Gardening”, “Your Home” and “Present Giving and Receiving”.
It’s tempting from this evidence to conclude that, long before the internet celebrated the infinite banality of the everyday on a vast and meaningless scale, Mass Observation was allowing us a more selective, if inevitably biased, view of the same in words and pictures. This raises the obvious question: have Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Instagram made Mass Observation a relic of some already distant analog past?
Not so, says Russell Roberts. “Is the web an archive? Does it have any order?” he responds. “No, it’s a free and fluid place where millions of pictures float unseen and unexamined. An archive such as Mass Observation offers you longevity and order and a way to navigate through detailed information. It’s a collective social project where the underlying aim is to try to understand ordinary lives. Mass Observation really is an experiment in extended social documentary and, as such, remains quite unique.”
As a nod to the me-centred world we live in, the exhibition will also feature the responses to an altogether more contemporary Mass Observation directive from 2012, intriguingly entitled Photography and You, which was specially commissioned for the Photographers’ Gallery show. The gallery’s digital programme will also allow the public “to respond to and participate in a series of gallery directives”.
Roberts describes the exhibition as a whole as “an experiment that is in keeping with the original ethos of the Mass Observation project, but also one that will hopefully help reclaim the photograph as an important part of the Mass Observation undertaking”. An archive of everyday life, then, but one that, for all its order and detail, seems already part of another time, another world, before the whirlwind of digital information and imagery overwhelmed us on a scale that the founders of Mass Observation could never have imagined.
Mass Observation: This Is Your Photo runs at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1, 2 Aug-29 Sept
Article source: http://petapixel.com/2010/05/19/nikon-d4x-concept-camera-design/
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