Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life by Annebella Pollen

Abstract

Photographic projects claiming to represent Britain, or even the world, on one day pose fascinating questions about visual culture: not least, what sense scholars can make of them. In Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life, Pollen addresses this question through a finely tuned study of the One Day for Life (ODfL) project. This fundraising campaign, launched by the cancer charity Search 88 in June 1987, amassed 55,000 photographic prints on August 14, 1987, taken mostly by women; the winning entries were subsequently published twelve weeks later in a book entitled One Day for Life. Foregrounding the ODfL project, but engaging also with similar analogue and digital initiatives, Pollen establishes the academic significance of mass photography, challenging a continuing tendency to dismiss domestic and amateur photography as banal and trite. She considers how we might interpret mass photography, exploring the historically specific meanings of the ODfL project and what it reveals about ‘more enduring cultural performances, about charity, identity, memory, emotion and competition’ (p. 3). Strategies for managing the potentially overwhelming number of photos amassed in ODfL, and for evaluating the photographic practices and outputs that constituted this project, are a necessary prelude to interpretation and are discussed in detail. Pollen usefully identifies two types of approach to mass photography. First, those that focus on what photos show and that analyse pictorial subjects. Second, ethnographic or anthropological approaches that address what photographs do. Pollen rejects the first type of approach because images are often inadequate indicators of meaning and purpose; as she points out, cement mixers can stand for grief and kittens for cancer. Adopting the second, Pollen explains that ‘photographs – inscribed on the reverse as well as displaying an image on the front – may be seen as tangible and purposeful performances with work to do as well as images to show’ (p. 13). The book, therefore, focuses on stories about, and practices around, the photographs because, in mass photography projects, ‘photos are made meaningful through the desires they enact, the communities they create, the public concerns they address, the memories they anticipate’ (p. 219). Pollen presents the results of several layers of research. There is a cultural biography of ODfL embracing its aspirations and plans; sponsors and publicity; submission, selection and judging processes, including how 55,000 images were reduced to a shortlist of 4000 in four days; the publicity and launch of the book featuring the winning entries; the folding of the charity on October 31, 1991; and the archiving of the photos and related documentation in the Mass Observation Archive. Tackling the huge quantities of photos and materials amassed by the ODfL project, Pollen leads us through the different elements of her scrutiny of its archive: what is in it, the technique and