ABSTRACT
On the top floor of the Wigan Pier Heritage Centre there is a small photographic exhibition. The actual photographs tell a different story. Those by William Wickham were taken with the anthropological eye of a Victorian clergyman: his images were used as lantern slides for lectures. In the photographs by Kevin Cummins both the photographer and the people he photographed have become entirely self-conscious. Post-modernism is a difficult concept, because it is composed of contradictory elements. Post-modernism and the heritage industry are linked, in that they both conspire to create a shallow screen that intervenes between our present lives, and our history.
