1. How We Are: Photographing Britain Tate Britain, 2007

2. Previous week discussed photography in 19th century and its potential to ‘democratise’ portraiture, making it available to non-elites. Also, its use in the formation and creation of individual and group identities. This continued in the 20th century, expanding as equipment and processing became cheaper making camera ownership, and photography, accessible to the majority. Also, between the two world wars, colour photography was introduced.
How We Are: Photographing Britain explored the ways in which photography has been used to grapple with the notion of ‘Britishness’ from the 1840s to the early 2000s, a period when the expansion, protection and loss of empire brought to the fore questions of national identity and continued to change the ethnic and racial composition of Britain.

3. The nation ‘is an imagined political community … It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities London: Verso, 2006)
Susan Bright: ‘Once we being to think about what defines the nation, and how the nation describes itself through representations then the complexities, contradictions and challenges of a British national identity come to the fore … what binds the British … together is not actual experience, but shared mental images.’
Val Williams and Susan Bright (eds), How We Are: Photographing Britain From the 1840s to the Present (London: Tate Publishing, 2007)

4. War
Photography was used to subvert or challenge traditional heroic images.
Images of WWI soldiers in National Portrait Gallery, such as John Singer Sargent’s General Officers of World War I (1922), show them as upright, confident, bodily whole.

5. John Singer Sargent, General Officers of World War I (1922) http://www

6. In contrast, Percy Hennell was employed by the Office of War Information, during World War II, to record the work of plastics surgeons. He photographed the faces and bodies of injured soldiers and civilians, presenting a very different image of the war hero.

7. Percy Hennell, Wartime injury of the left eye which has been removed and replaced with a flap of skin taken from the scalp or forehead which is bandaged (Undated)

8. Immigration
There have been migrants to Britain for years, but Britain’s imperial expansion, and the 1949 establishment of the Commonwealth, ostensibly extended to millions the possibility of migration to Britain as British citizens.
1951 census:
Indians 30,800
Pakistanis 5,000
West Indians 15,300
1961 census:
Indians 81,400
Pakistanis 24,900
West Indians 171,800
 + c. 20,000 West Africans and c. 30,000 migrants from Far East.
James Walvin, Passage to Britain: Immigration in British History and Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984)
Walvin’s figures indicate West Indians numerically most significant immigrant group in post-war period. Most were in their twenties. Some had come during WW2 and stayed, but majority recruited to fill labour gaps: transport authorities, hotels and hospitals organised recruiting drives in West Indies. Invited as Commonwealth citizens, but received frosty welcome.

9. ‘...postwar immigrants came to Tony Walker’s Belle Vue studios in Bradford and to Harry Jacobs’ shop in south London, posing for a photograph to send home, to show evidence of the benificence of the mother country. In the Belle Vue archive, men stand covered with pound notes or proudly in possession of a radio; a young woman looks dignified in a nurse’s uniform …
Val Williams and Susan Bright (eds), How We Are: Photographing Britain From the 1840s to the Present (London: Tate Publishing, 2007)

10. Image from Tony Walker’s Belle Vue studio archive, subject unknown,

11. ‘ … Harry Jacobs’ generations of black south Londoners stand against the studio’s background of country scenes, dressed in their best, turned out for the camera.’ The portraits … ‘make their tenuous foothold in the mother country seem stronger and more permanent.’
Val Williams and Susan Bright (eds), How We Are: Photographing Britain From the 1840s to the Present (London: Tate Publishing, 2007)

12. Harry Jacobs, undated portrait photograph (There is a link to an article about Harry Jacobs on course VLE)

13. Roger Mayne, Girl Jiving, Southam Street, 1957
Youth
1950s+ - rise of a distinct youth culture, with youth the defining feature of the self.
Roger Mayne, Girl Jiving, Southam Street, 1957

14. Daniel Meadows toured Britain in the 1970s with his Free Photographic Omnibus ‘inviting citizens to have their portraits taken ... Teenaged girls stand together against an urban background in wide-lapelled jackets of polyester and synthetic tweed; tartan shirts were popular in Barrow-in Furness, stripy tank tops in Southampton.’ The sitters were self-selecting and ‘[t]he results were remarkable as “ordinary” people presented themselves to the camera, proudly displaying both costume and character.’
Val Williams and Susan Bright (eds), How We Are: Photographing Britain From the 1840s to the Present (London: Tate Publishing, 2007)

15. Daniel Meadows’ Free Photographic Omnibus

16. From the Daniel Meadows’ Free Photographic Omnibus Portrait Series

17. Derek Ridgers photographed the London clubbing scene in the late 1970s-80s – Thatcher’s Britain. ‘While Meadows’ subjects revealed themselves as gauche, inhibited and curious, Ridgers’s young men and women inhabited the camera’s gaze as performers in a very particular arena. But it was the ordinariness that he glimpsed in these costumed characters that makes his photographs so powerful – the people he photographed wore beauty like a mask. The worlds that Ridgers photographed were small ones, peopled by young men and women who were captivated by the idea of image. His photographs do not search souls, they look at surfaces; these are not so much portraits as documents.’
Val Williams and Susan Bright (eds), How We Are: Photographing Britain From the 1840s to the Present (London: Tate Publishing, 2007)

18. Derek Ridgers, Kings Road ’84, 1985 http://www.derekridgers.com

19. Youth: fashion and race/ethnicity
Jason Evans’ July 1991 fashion spread, ‘Strictly’, for i-D comprised10 photographs of young black men in suburban locations
The images: ‘propelled fashion photography into a new arena, in which it could discuss photography, race and sexuality. the clothes and locations were important because they were the vehicles for the discussion of a complex range of issues.’
Jason Evans: ‘I’d been reading about the history of the dandies, and at that time there was also a big raga thing going on ... a lot of sportswear, a lot of conspicuous consumption labels. Things that white people just wouldn’t wear ... The syntax was completely upside down ... it was a new vision of Britain. We were trying to break stereotypes.’
Val Williams and Susan Bright (eds), How We Are: Photographing Britain From the 1840s to the Present (London: Tate Publishing, 2007)

20. Jason Evans, Untitled, Strictly series, 1991 https://www.tate.org.uk

21. Portraits without People
The accessibility of photography allowed anyone to make/own portraits and produced the freedom to move away from capturing recognisable images of the subjects, to capturing their essence or leaving them out altogether.
Used to make a political point in Douglas Abuelo’s 2006 series, Where They Sleep, a study of the places homeless Londoners sleep, the people themselves are absent so the viewer’s imagination must supply the portrait.

22. Douglas Abuelo, Postcode – SE17 2UN, 2006

23. Marc Quinn, Sir John Edward Sulston, 2001 Sulston ‘is a central figure in the development of DNA analysis … Although entirely abstract, this portrait is an accurate display of Sulston's essential identity since it is composed of his own DNA.’

24. Vivienne Richmond, Selfie, 2014
Digital technology has made portraiture easier still, putting the ‘selfie’ centre stage and facilitating a virtually instantaneous stream of self-portraits in which the subject controls which aspects of his/her identity s/he wants to portray – but not how they are interpreted.
Vivienne Richmond, Selfie, 2014