Ideas

Initial Ideas
The thing that interested me the most during the initial lecture was the 'Mass Observation' in Bolton 1937 which Alan discussed in his presentation, so I decided to look in to it more. Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings joined together to study the everyday lives of ordinary British people and create an "anthropology of ourselves". They and a team of observers studied the lives of people in Bolton focussing on their attitudes and beliefs so that popular opinion could be properly understood. They engaged in a variety of public situations: meetings, religious occasions, sporting/leisure activities, in the street and at work and recorded people's behaviour and conversation in as much detail. The people of Bolton were mostly recorded without their knowledge but questionnaires and surveys were also used aswell as interviews. The observers were interested in a vast range of subjects including "housing, sport, fascism, communism, work, social conditions, religion, cinema, holidays, the onset of war, evacuation, rationing, the Blitz, public morale, post-war hopes, the welfare state, household budgeting, entertainment, shopping, education, the police, public health, trade unions, politics, strikes, transport, royalty, jazz, family planning, industry and drinking habits." As well as attitudes and beliefs the observers also recorded physical normalities in Bolton for example hats, clothing and hand gestures. They observed all kinds of minute details including the proportion of black to brown shoes worn on the high street and that the average portion of chips in a six-penny portion was 25 and a sixth!

I thought our group could also doing something like this in Hulme but obviously on a smaller scale. I particularly liked the idea of more physical details being recorded. One thing that sprung to mind was photographing every one of a certain object in Hulme and presenting them in a way similar to Bernd and Hilla Becher. (See images below.) The Becher's are well known for their grids of photographs showing different buildings which all share the same purpose, eg. a range of water towers. By arranging them side by side, the viewer is invited to compare their forms and designs. We could do this in Hulme, photographing every bus stop, shop, street sign or something similar and arranging them in a grid. Could even do a short film piece of each place and edit them together.