Another Place in Time: Documenting Blackpool for Mass Observation in the 1930s

Abstract

This article contextualises documentary photographs taken of working-class holidaymakers in Blackpool by Humphrey Spender in the late 1930s. Working for Tom Harrisson's northern branch of Mass Observation, Spender recorded how the residents of ‘Worktown’ (Bolton, Lancashire) spent the ‘fifty-second week’ or summer holiday period of each year. Harrisson recruited Spender for this task because his camera was an ideal apparatus for recording the most mundane details of average British lives. Yet these images (indeed, all the photographs taken by Spender for Mass Observation) were used only sparingly by the organisation at the time of their creation. This article examines reasons for this, suggesting that Harrisson's understanding of photographic realism in combination with his perception of national identity served to highlight photography's ability to undermine rather than affirm the goals of Mass Observation as Harrisson had conceived them.