Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of South Wales (joint submission with Cardiff Metropolitan University and University of Wales Trinity Saint David)
Mass Observation: This is Your Photo.
Curated Exhibition and international tour
Research Context
The central premise of Roberts’ research is that the work of the curator, especially when undertaken in a self-conscious and reflexive mode, embodies equivalent research dimensions to the work of the artist and the writer. The exhibition is the primary form and realisation of the research. Catalogues, books, essays, conferences and symposia surrounding it are vital parts of the critical context. They are conceived in parallel and ground the research beyond what is initially a dialogue between images, objects and ideas.
Research Imperatives
The exhibition is the culmination of several research projects in which the work of Mass Observation (MO) has figured. Exploring the historical and contemporary importance of MO through its archive, it marks research exploring the archival imagination and the multiple rôles of photography in shaping social evidence and historical consciousness.
Project methods
The curation works through MO’s innovative approach to collecting data, where photography figured prominently from 1939 – 1947, to quieter autobiographical accounts following the re-launch of MO in 1980 as a life-writing project. The exhibition sets up dialogues between photographic values and sociological and anthropological methods, using visual display and text to open the archive and its formation to wider critical appreciation of its visual legacy.
The work develops an exhibition form that connects with the organisation dynamics of the archive, using visual display as narrative and performance, whereby archival contents function as part of a critical account and appreciation of MO’s thinking. The exhibition is a close reading of the archive and its dispersed contents, with the generation of new archival stories around photography, whereby the exhibition research process has resulted in contemporary accounts of photography to be added to archival holdings to ensure legacy for this intervention.
Dissemination
Research Symposium, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2013)
Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam (2013, in preparation)
