Mass-Observation and Visual Culture

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 195
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781351559003
ISBN-13 : 1351559001
Rating : 4/5 (03 Downloads)

Synopsis Mass-Observation and Visual Culture by : LucyD. Curzon

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain critically analyses the role that visual culture played in the early development of Mass-Observation, the innovative British anthropological research group founded in 1937. The group?s production and use of painting, collage, photography, and other media illustrates not only the broad scope of Mass-Observation?s efforts to document everyday life, but also, more specifically, the centrality of visual elements to its efforts at understanding national identity in the 1930s. Although much interest has previously focused on Mass-Observation?s use of written reports and opinion surveys, as well as diaries that were kept by hundreds of volunteer observers, this book is the first full-length study of the group?s engagement with visual culture. Exploring the paintings of Graham Bell and William Coldstream; the photographs of Humphrey Spender; the paintings, collages, and photographs of Julian Trevelyan; and Humphrey Spender?s photographs and widely recognized ?Mass-Observation film?, Spare Time, among other sources, Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain positions these works as key sources of information with regard to illuminating the complex character of British identity during the Depression era.

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 368
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781351558990
ISBN-13 : 1351558994
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Synopsis Mass-Observation and Visual Culture by : LucyD. Curzon

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain critically analyses the role that visual culture played in the early development of Mass-Observation, the innovative British anthropological research group founded in 1937. The group?s production and use of painting, collage, photography, and other media illustrates not only the broad scope of Mass-Observation?s efforts to document everyday life, but also, more specifically, the centrality of visual elements to its efforts at understanding national identity in the 1930s. Although much interest has previously focused on Mass-Observation?s use of written reports and opinion surveys, as well as diaries that were kept by hundreds of volunteer observers, this book is the first full-length study of the group?s engagement with visual culture. Exploring the paintings of Graham Bell and William Coldstream; the photographs of Humphrey Spender; the paintings, collages, and photographs of Julian Trevelyan; and Humphrey Spender?s photographs and widely recognized ?Mass-Observation film?, Spare Time, among other sources, Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain positions these works as key sources of information with regard to illuminating the complex character of British identity during the Depression era.

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture

Mass-Observation and Visual Culture
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages :
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1351558986
ISBN-13 : 9781351558983
Rating : 4/5 (86 Downloads)

Synopsis Mass-Observation and Visual Culture by : Lucy D. Curzon

Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture

Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 200
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781317060796
ISBN-13 : 1317060792
Rating : 4/5 (96 Downloads)

Synopsis Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture by : Rosemary Shirley

Through the lens of the everyday, this book explores ’the countryside’ as an inhabited and practised realm with lived rhythms and routines. It relocates the topography of everyday life from its habitually urban focus, out into the English countryside. The rural is often portrayed as existing outside of modernity, or as its passive victim. Here, the rural is recast as an active and complex site of modernity, a shift which contributes alternative ways of thinking the rural and a new perspective on the everyday. In each chapter, pieces of visual culture - including scrapbooks, art works, adverts, photographs and films - are presented as tools of analysis which articulate how aspects of the everyday might operate differently in non-metropolitan places. The book features new readings of the work of significant artists and photographers, such as Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Stephen Willats, Anna Fox, Andrew Cross, Tony Ray Jones and Homer Sykes, seen through this rural lens, together with analysis of visually fascinating archival materials including early Shell Guides and rarely seen scrapbooks made by the Women’s Institute. Combining everyday life, rural modernity and visual cultures, this book is able to uncover new and different stories about the English countryside and contribute significantly to current thinking on everyday life, rural geographies and visual cultures.

The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation

The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages : 249
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781350215764
ISBN-13 : 1350215767
Rating : 4/5 (64 Downloads)

Synopsis The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation by : Lucy D. Curzon

The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation embraces new approaches and themes that highlight Mass Observation's long history as an innovative research organization, a social movement, and an archival project. Spanning the period from Mass Observation's inception to the present day, essay authors discuss a wide range of topics including anthropology, history, popular politics, cultural studies, literature, selfhood, emotion, art and visual studies. Indeed, what emerges across this volume is confirmation that engagement with Mass Observation-whether its historical materials or those produced in the last decade-is crucial to understanding the vast array of experiences that make up British life.

Reflections on British Royalty

Reflections on British Royalty
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages : 220
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781350107168
ISBN-13 : 1350107166
Rating : 4/5 (68 Downloads)

Synopsis Reflections on British Royalty by : Jennifer J. Purcell

In this original volume, Jennifer J. Purcell and Fiona Courage curate and contextualize the rich archival materials of social research organisation Mass-Observation on the British popular imagination of the monarchy and the royal family between 1937 and 2022. From the coronation of George VI in 1937 to Elizabeth II's death – via war, weddings, a jubilee and a tragedy – this book incorporates everything from diaries and detailed responses to questionnaires, internal organisational documents and published reports on popular attitudes to royalty in order to reveal the complex nature of Britain's relationship with its monarchy in the modern era. How does the British public imagine the monarchy and its role in British society and governance? What is the relationship between the British people and the Crown? Using material from Mass-Observation, which has been asking these questions for over 80 years, Reflections on British Royalty gets to the heart of these issues and more besides.

Techniques of the Observer

Techniques of the Observer
Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
Total Pages : 190
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0262531070
ISBN-13 : 9780262531078
Rating : 4/5 (70 Downloads)

Synopsis Techniques of the Observer by : Jonathan Crary

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

Mass-Observation

Mass-Observation
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages : 161
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781350226494
ISBN-13 : 1350226491
Rating : 4/5 (94 Downloads)

Synopsis Mass-Observation by : Jennifer J. Purcell

This book reproduces the original 1937 founding pamphlet of Mass-Observation – the compelling social research project that ran for decades in the mid-20th century – with expert commentary throughout. It also features brand new supporting essays by and informative interviews with prominent scholars of Mass-Observation which reflect on the organisation, its origins and its influence on multiple academic disciplines, including history, sociology and anthropology. An introductory essay by the editor synthesizes the arguments of this material, as well as contributing vital historical context and suggestions for ways in which other disciplines might benefit from the use of Mass-Observation approaches and archival material. There is also a chronology of Mass-Observation, its publications and major figures associated with it. Mass-Observation offers an unparalleled wealth of insights into the lived experiences of Britons in the 20th century and this volume provides the best introduction to it available, familiarizing you with both the original Mass-Observation aims and what value this fascinating material carries for us today.

Mass Photography

Mass Photography
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 256
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781000211757
ISBN-13 : 1000211754
Rating : 4/5 (57 Downloads)

Synopsis Mass Photography by : Annebella Pollen

With increasingly accessible camera technology, crowdsourced public media projects abound like never before. Such projects often seek to secure a snapshot of a single day in order to establish communities and create visual time capsules for the future. Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life assesses the potential of these popular moment-in-time projects by examining their current day prevalence and their historical predecessors. Through archival research and interviews with organisers and participants, it examines, for the first time, the vast photographic collections resulting from such projects, analysing their structures and systems, their aims and objectives, and their claims and promises. The central case study is the 55,000 photographs submitted to One Day for Life in 1987, which aimed, in its own time, to be ‘the biggest photographic event the world had ever seen’.

The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain

The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages : 248
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781350106925
ISBN-13 : 1350106925
Rating : 4/5 (25 Downloads)

Synopsis The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain by : Kimberly Mair

During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defence by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals, and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to those daily routines in homes and neighbourhoods. Kimberly Mair looks at how government publicity campaigns communicated new instructions for care formally, while the circulation of wartime rumours negotiated these instructions informally. These rumours, she argues, explicitly repudiated the improper socialization of evacuees and also produced a salient, but contested, image of the host as a good wartime citizen who was impervious to the cultural invasion of the ostensibly 'animalistic', dirty, and destructive house guest. Mair also considers the explicit contestations over the value of the lives of pets, conceived as animals who do not work with animal caregivers whose use of limited provisions or personal sacrifice could then be judged in the context of wartime hardship. Together, formal and informal instructions for caregiving reshaped everyday habits in the war years to an idealized template of the good citizen committed to the war and nation, with Mass-Observation enacting a watchful form of care by surveilling civilian feeling and habit in the process.