The Worktown Photographs of Mass-Observation: from Anthropological Data to Digitalised Images

Abstract

Mass-Observation was created in the 1930s; this was an era that began with an economic slump and concluded with a world war. The founders of Mass-Observation, the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, journalist and poet Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, aimed to record everyday life in Britain. This ‘anthropology of ourselves’ culminated in the union of two disparate projects: Harrisson’s Worktown in the north of England and Madge and Jennings’s National Panel based in London. Their methods of research were innovative and mostly relied on a system of observers. Harrisson’s anthropological research in Worktown included photography as a form of data collection. The principal photographer was the photojournalist Humphrey Spender who took around 900 photographs for Harrisson’s Worktown project. At the time of taking the photographs were largely ignored and remained in obscurity until the 1970s when Harrisson began exploiting the Mass-Observation archive.

Although the Worktown photographs are predominantly understood in a documentary context, little attention has been given to the photographs as anthropological data or their place in the development of visual research. Hence, this study is part of a small body of research into their use as a form of visual anthropology. The main emphasis is on the production and contemporary use of the Worktown photographs but extends to their afterlife up to their latest trajectory as digital images. It will be argued that the methodology in Worktown was flawed, undermining the photographs as anthropological data. Moreover, that the best explanation for the photographs not being published contemporaneously was fear of litigation. Furthermore, that even if published, the evidence suggests that Harrisson would have imposed his own meaning onto the photographs.