In 1937, a group of researchers started work on a project with the intention of creating a comprehensive record of the nature of everyday life in Britain. Members of ‘Mass Observation’, as the group called themselves, sat in pubs, churches and at sporting events and simply wrote down what they saw: how people behaved, interacted with each other and even the way they spoke, recorded in as much detail as possible. The aim, the researchers said, was to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’.
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| Stanage Edge, Hathersage, Derbyshire, 3rd August 2008 (©2008-2011 Simon Roberts. All rights reserved) |
This tradition is maintained in the 21st Century by the work of the photographer Simon Roberts, who last night gave a talk about his work at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham. In August 2007, seventy years since Mass Observation began their own record of the British, Roberts began a year-long journey around England in a motorhome, photographing the scenes and people he came across. Roberts had just returned from spending a year in Russia, where he was struck by what he saw as the Russian attachment to the ‘Motherland’ (shown in his collection of photography by the same name). This encouraged Roberts to think about whether there was an equivalent sense of the English. So in 2007 Roberts set out to see what he could find.
Roberts’ resulting photographs, taken using a 5x4 large-format camera and currently on display at the Midlands Arts Centre, represent a strikingly beautiful record of life in England. They depict scenes that anyone who has spent any time in England will immediately recognise. The photographs show, for example, holiday-makers sheltering from the wind and eating home-made sandwiches; a group of day-trippers eating ice-cream beside a car park; Ladies’ Day at Aintree Racing Course. Many of the scenes Roberts depicts were also a feature of the work of Mass Observation decades earlier. The images show, for example, a group of football fans on their way to the match, and they also reaffirm that the English love for the seaside is as strong as ever. Yet these are most clearly contemporary images. The fashions of the people in the photographs show this – such as the predominance of globally branded clothes like Adidas – but so do the people themselves. Roberts’ photographs provide a clear illustration that, despite what the politicians may say, multiculturalism remains alive and well in England.
These images are a record of places as well as people. Roberts, who has a background in social Geography, took many of the photographs from on top of his motorhome, thus providing a panoramic view of the scenes before him. People often appear dwarfed by the landscapes around them, but they are also shown to be fundamentally a part of them. In one image (pictured), Roberts captures an Asian couple in the distance walking along a rural path, and they later tell him that it is the English countryside in which they feel most at home. In another image, we see an elderly couple admiring a view on fold-up chairs. They have been admiring the same view, it later transpires, for fifty years, and the only things to change were the farmers’ tractor and the salt-box by the side of the road.
In the 1930s, Mass Observation recruited ordinary people to keep diaries of their everyday lives. In 2007, Roberts also enlisted the help of the public, asking people to make suggestions of events for him to photograph and, for his recent project photographing the 2010 General Election, requesting that people send in their own photographs. Taken together, what the photographs of Roberts and his own team of ‘mass observers’ allude to, is a modern-day ‘anthropology of ourselves’.
Simon Roberts: We English is on at the MAC until the 17th of July; his election photographs are on at the same venue until the 26 June. For more information, please visit Simon’s website at http://simoncroberts.com.
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