Photographing the Everyday Surreal: Julian Trevelyan's Portrayals of British Ritualistic Behaviour 1937–39

Abstract

The British Surrealist painter, collagist and photographer Julian Trevelyan became involved during 1937 and 1938 with Tom Harrisson's anthropological research organisation ‘Mass-Observation’. The images he created during his short periods of observational study in Bolton and Blackpool – or ‘Worktown’ and ‘Worktown on Holiday’ – are powerful in their suggestions of the levels of unease repressed at this tumultuous time within the British psyche. The artist achieves these evocations of the unconscious mind, which, according to Freudian theory, was the director of behaviour, through an amalgamation of documentary and Surrealist visualities – in essence, through repeated portrayals of the ‘everyday surreal’. The narrative scrutinises Trevelyan's attention to the psychological impact of the nation's material decline upon those believed by Mass-Observation to be most directly affected: the population of Northern England's industrial towns. This he pursues through a systematic visual registration of working-class behavioural patterns during ‘spare time’, a time when human beings were reasoned by the organisation to be most true to themselves. Ritualistic behaviour associated with the consumption of food and drink is considered. So too is the pursuit of leisure in Worktown, as well as the religious rituals to which its population adhered. The contribution made by Julian Trevelyan to British art and letters during the interwar period constitutes a fantasmic social psychology of that contemporary crisis.