Barrenness and Abjection? : The Iconography of the Wasteland in the Photographs and Collages of Julian Trevelyan, 1937–1938

Abstract

British artist Julian Trevelyan (1910–1988), during 1937 and 1938, went to work for a series of short periods in Bolton, Whitehaven, and Blackpool, three northern English towns where scenes of urban, industrial, and even corporeal decay appear to have surrounded him on every side. Having been plucked from his southern middle‐class background and installed within this deprived geographical area by Tom Harrisson (1911–1976), founder of the anthropological research organization Mass‐Observation, this strangely neglected surrealist figure produced numerous photographs, collages, paintings, and texts that almost always explore, as their central theme, the aesthetic category of decline. This he achieves in visual terms through an amalgamation of surrealist and documentary techniques and methods, and the results are powerfully reflective of Britain’s seriously depressed interwar economic climate. In this article, I examine one aspect of Trevelyan’s visual output in Bolton: the iconography of the typically barren and abject territory that is the urban and industrial wasteland. I consider, for example, his interpretation of the physical and metaphorical impact upon this indeterminate site of electricity. This is represented visually by proliferating chains of looming pylons, which ultimately are seen to throw into question Blackpool’s adoption of electrical energy as its most proudly boasted modernizing force. Visual evocations of Britain’s thriving class divide, made possible by this radical artist’s picturing of the wasteland as a particular kind of void, are also probed here.