Sunday 9 March 2014

Humphrey Spender

Style
Whilst Spender was publicly educated and thus considered an outsider when it came to the working class town of Bolton; he had sufficient skill with the camera to record the daily activities, effectively peoples private lives, with empathy and sensitivity. 

Themes
All things and activities that communicated the every-day way-of-life of the working class inhabitants of Bolton.

Ethics
Spender and the other photographers recognised that in order for this project to have any worth, the necessary observation had to take place surreptitiously, otherwise any recorded activity could not be guaranteed to be genuine (rather than artificially influence because of the camera). This concept of candid photography is well know and reasons well understood by street photographers today, however, the MO project took recording to a whole new level - hundreds of people were recruited to 'spy' on the towns folk and record everything - behaviour, conversations, reactions. So whilst Spender may well have acted ethically as an individual in terms of the images he made, he obviously had no scruples that Bolton became a lab-rat-town.

Purpose
Specifically, Mass Observation was a social research organisation founded in 1937, the aim of which was to create an 'anthropology of ourselves'. In Bolton, a team of paid investigators went into a variety of public situations: meetings, religious occasions, sporting and leisure activities, in the street and at work, and recorded people's behaviour and conversation in as much detail as possible. The material they produced is a varied documentary account of life in Britain.
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. From an article in the Guardian "The way we were..." by Sean O'Hagan (21-July-2013)
Whilst the reasons for this recording activity were allegedly altruistic - understand the people in detail, thus truly understand their issues and one is better able to create appropriate solutions. Nonetheless, there was no communication with the population prior to the instigation of the project, as such it is perfectly reasonable to question the intention of the research organisation regarding the use and the lifespan of the data/information gathered.

Other references:
Mass Observation - recording everyday life in Britain
The Humphrey Spender Archive Online

No comments:

Post a Comment