ABSTRACT

It was the poet, Kathleen Raine, who, writing about the pre-World War Two beginnings of the British ethnographic movement, Mass-Observation (M-O), described that movement’s surrealist inflected project as having made possible ‘a kind of poetic (or pictorial) imagery at once irrational and objective’ (cited in Ray, 1971, p.178). Raine’s perception of the irrational potential of ‘an imagery of precise and objective realism, gathered from the daily human (and therefore especially urban) scene, from the habitat of the common man’ (p. 178),1 has I believe, an emblematic significance in characterizing the consequences for the viewer, of the photographs of place under discussion in this chapter. It allows us to account for the way in which they mediate or construct our relationships to the things and places they depict. It is the ‘irrational’ action or agency of these photographs, in relation to their unavoidable groundedness in the obdurate details of daily life, which forms the starting point for this chapter.2 It is structured around a series of observations about the irrational potential of photographs of place and develops by examining how, in the light of the evidence offered by specific images, we might use these observations to explore the operation for the viewer, of an imagery ostensibly characterized by its precise and objective realism.