Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to catch the tail end of the Mass Observation: This is Your Picture exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery in Soho. The Mass Observation project (MO) is like nothing else in social research - it began in 1937 and ran until the early 1950's, with the aim of documenting the minutiae of the everyday life of the masses, but with a twist. The 'researchers' were the ordinary folk themselves, trained to be observers of their own settings, and building one of the largest archives of social history anywhere in the world in the process. In 1981, the University of Sussex restarted data collection and it continues to this day.
For example, this wonderful plan of a cottage garden shows how the land was laid out, but it also shows how the function of our outside space has changed - this is a working garden, full of veg and livestock to feed the family - no room for patio heaters and swinging chairs or gas barbecues here! - it is also a visual clue as to how much more room (physically and socially) we now have for leisure in our lives.
This particular slice of the MO displayed at this exhibition was, unsurprisingly, themed around the role of photography in the project (as a methods of data capture) but also as a topic in itself. How do people use photos in their day to day lives? What for and when? And how has that changed over time? In the early study, the photos were all taken by a trained professional photographer. Of course not many of the good folk of the 1940's owned cameras and if they did, they wouldn't waste their precious film on taking photos of the contents of the larder or the view from the box room over the gardens. These early photos were also taken covertly - something that rarely happens now, at least if you're the least bit ethical in your practice. But as the quote below shows, these photographers had little choice because pointing a camera at someone was so rare:
But by the time we get to the late 1990's, snapshots proliferate, all manner of objects are photographed from all manner of angles, and taken by the observers themselves. I wonder what the original MO observers would have made of Instagram or Flickr? Photographs are ubiquitous in modern society and we take no notice of someone raising a camera - or a phone, or even an iPad. We take photos more for sharing experiences in the here and now, than we do as records for posterity, something which some commentators say is impoverishing - we're always looking through a lens at the world instead of just experiencing life
But as I shuffled round the galleries, peering at lovely black and white prints of factory girls pouring out through work gates, and kids playing in streets (no doubt long flattened to make way for multi-storey car parks and superstores), I was reminded how difficult it is to judge what is useful or interesting research from our own point in space and time. I'd be willing to bet that the friends and neighbours of the 'observers' in the 1940s thought they were a bit bonkers making detailed notes of the order the woman over the road scrubbed her flags in, and logging the contents of the mantlepieces of all the houses in the street. Didn't they know there was a war on?! Yet here I was seventy odd years later, along with hundreds of other 21st century voyeurs, feeling moved by how exotic and precious these glimpses of the past now were - despite them being the epitome of the mundane of their time.
Sadly, these days, research like the MO, that doesn't have immediate impact, or add (financial) value to society is getting scarcer as researchers these days have to fight over shrinking pots of cash to fund their work. The Economic and Social Research Council funded just over 13% of the applications it received in 2012 - you wouldn't take those odds on a horse would you? - yet we spend huge amounts of time and energy writing applications that we're nearly 90% certain not to get. Madness really.
