Keeley - Mass Observation and Humphrey Spender

''As a result of the Abdication Crisis…we realised as never before the sway of superstition in the midst of science. How little we know of our next door neighbour and his habits. Of conditions of life and thought in another class or district our ignorance is complete. The anthropology of ourselves is still only a dream.'' - introductory pamphlet to the Mass Observation project of 1930s Britain

Much of Spender’s work was unseen and unpublished until the 1970s, though some of it was used in the weekly magazine Picture Post which helped shape British journalism and a new social consciousness incorporating the proletariat plight. He merged individual drama with an emerging and more egalitarian politics of the Auden generation, when the Marxist and Communist parties attracted artists and thinkers. He used instantaneous and ephemeral situations from the street because

The kind of photograph that interests me most is a revelation of human behaviour…the photographers I continue to appreciate and admire most are those concerned with humanity – those who, in disclosing humanity and human behaviour, also disclose part of their own attitude towards humanity and human behaviour (Spender, Worktown People 1982: 21).

 http://www.jameslomax.com/words/1045/mass-observation-and-humphrey-spender

Keeley