Cultural Snipers: Photographic Portraiture in Britain, 1970-1990
Lead Research Organisation:
Birkbeck, University of London
Department Name: History of Art
Abstract
My proposal to the Cultural Snipers: Photographic Portraiture in Britain, 1970-1990 AHRC CPD Collaborative Doctoral Partnership asks what political conditions were imagined and produced by the radical British portrait photographers of the 1970s and 80s? And by what means is it possible to reproduce, or even access, those political desires today? My proposal assumes and argues for photography as a technology of social and political reproduction, which actively forms subjects and publics, and that the expansion and dramatization of this process was amongst the key interventions made into portraiture by Jo Spence, Terry Dennett, and their peers and collaborators, including Ed Barber, Shirley Read, and Peter Kennard. My project will focus on the relationship between the modes of production, display, and distribution of these portraits. Both in the self organised projects of groups such as the Half Moon Photography Workshop and The Hackney Flashers and in instances where works were included in such exhibitions as Three Perspectives on Photography at the Hayward Gallery in London (1979,) Ten Contemporary British Photographers at MIT (1982) and later historical restaging's of the work including Jo Spence: Work (Part I & II) at Studio Voltaire (2012). My work will also look at the distribution of these portraits in books and magazines.
The second part of my research question, which asks about the possibility of contemporary access to the politics and practices of these photographers, is a response to the lack or lag, identified in the call for proposals between curatorial and critical interest in these works, and scholarship on the same subject. The method of research I propose is as much curatorial and material methodology as academic. I will begin my research with the material available in Jo Spence Memorial Archive Library and produce public outcomes in the form of events and exhibitions as a way of periodizing my academic work. I believe this is important, as part of my project is an engagement with the ways in which disciplinary boundaries affect and produce knowledge. I believe this is a pertinent inquiry to the material as well as to the question of reproduction and is uniquely suitable for a doctoral project organised between both a university and a national museum.
The second part of my research question, which asks about the possibility of contemporary access to the politics and practices of these photographers, is a response to the lack or lag, identified in the call for proposals between curatorial and critical interest in these works, and scholarship on the same subject. The method of research I propose is as much curatorial and material methodology as academic. I will begin my research with the material available in Jo Spence Memorial Archive Library and produce public outcomes in the form of events and exhibitions as a way of periodizing my academic work. I believe this is important, as part of my project is an engagement with the ways in which disciplinary boundaries affect and produce knowledge. I believe this is a pertinent inquiry to the material as well as to the question of reproduction and is uniquely suitable for a doctoral project organised between both a university and a national museum.
