<i>Global Economic History</i>. Edited by Tirthankar Roy and Giorgio Riello. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xiv+370. $120.00 (cloth); $36.95 (paper); $33.25 (e-book).

Edwards, Andrew David

doi:10.1086/716789

Cited by 1 publication

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“…As a result, photographs of food in MO COVID-19 diaries become historical documents performed for posterity in a project whose bread and butter is the documentation of everyday life; they move, in contributors’ eyes, from narcissism to public good. As visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards has observed, in relation to photographs and the construction of historical meaning, ‘However banal and inconsequential the subject matter, the photograph frames the fleeting instant: it heightens, projects, performs and pushes into significance and analytical possibility.’ She argues that photographs, even if of the minor details of everyday life, ‘vastly expand the range of traces that might both constitute and inform a sequence of events’; that is, they become the building blocks that constitute the making of history ( Edwards, 2022 : 59).…”

Section: Covid-19 Photographic Patterns: Mass Observation's Daily Breadmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections

Pollen

2023

History of the Human Sciences

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What is to be gained by studying visual observation in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections? What can we see of the pandemic through diarists’ images and words? Visual methods were part of the plural research strategies of social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) in its first phase, when it was established in 1937, but remained marginal in relation to textual research methods. This continues with the post-1981 revival of the Mass Observation Project (MOP), with its emphasis on life writing. With wider shifts in technology and accessibility, however, even when they are not solicited, photographs now accompany MOP correspondents’ submissions. In MO’s substantial COVID-19 collections, images appear in or as diary entries across a range of forms, including hand-drawn illustrations, correspondent-generated photographs, creative photomontages, and screengrabs of memes. In addition, diarists offer textual reflections on COVID-19's image cultures, such as the role of photographs in pandemic news media, as well as considering how the pandemic is intersecting with the visual in more abstract ways, from themes of surveillance and ‘Staying Alert’ in public health messaging to internal pictorial imaginaries produced as a result of isolation and contemplation. Positioning these materials in relation to wider patterns in pandemic visual culture, including public photographic collecting projects that make explicit reference to MO as their inspiration, this article considers the contribution of the visual submissions and image-rich writing in MO's COVID-19 collections to the depiction of a virus commonly characterised as invisible.

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Section: Covid-19 Photographic Patterns: Mass Observation's Daily Breadmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections

Pollen

2023

History of the Human Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Global Economic History. Edited by Tirthankar Roy and Giorgio Riello. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xiv+370. $120.00 (cloth); $36.95 (paper); $33.25 (e-book).

Cited by 1 publication

References 3 publications

‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections

‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections

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