SOCIALVISION

popular visual culture

modernism and community in Britain 1941-1951

This site looks at the development a popular visual culture in

Britain during the period 1941-1951. The period begins with the

publication of Picture Post's "Plan for Britain" and ends with the

closure of the Festival of Britain.

The circumstances of war created an opportunity to establish a

visual culture able to express the collective hopes and high ideals

of a particularly British form of revolutionary socialism. Elsewhere,

writers such as George Orwell and J B Priestly gave expression

to the the same hope as did the radical Tom Wintringham. You can

read about this in Orwell's "Patriots and Revolutionaries."

The economic and political conditions of war in Britain were crucial

in allowing this opportunity to develop. Firstly, the propaganda

requirements of war required a much wider and more urgent production

of visual communications between the state and its people. This could

only be achieved by the use of technologies of mass communication and

a commitment, on the part of the Establishmant class, to move beyond

the cosy relationships that had characterised the relations between the

political class and the vested interests of the print media. Secondly, the

material shortages of war and the economic austerity of the Home Front

practically destroyed the political economy of a print media funded on

advertising revenues.

Writing to his American friends at The Partisan Review in April 1941, George

Orwell noted that control of editorial policy in the print media had passed to

journalists and away from that of the advertsing departments. He predicted

that, should the war continue, the newspaper industry might even have to be

nationalised if it were to survive. In fact, the propaganda requirements of Total

War were more than adequate to ensure the survival of the print media.

However, the proliferation of images in the development of a mass visual

culture changed their political status. The controlling mechanisms of capital

and state, developed in a long period before WW2, could no longer apply.

Accordingly, the proliferation of images made possible by the technologies

of photography, film, offset-litho and mechanical reproduction gave these

images the radical potential anticipated by Walter Benjamin in 1934.

In consequence, this site is interested in a visual culture of mass produced

images and their circulation through the mass media. Socialvision will examine

posters and propaganda, book and magazine production, photography, film,

textiles and the reproduction of fine art images in the service of the war effort

and reconstruction. The project acknowledges the potential of printed paper

artefacts to provide a historical record beyond the normal remit of academic history.

This potential has been recognised by Raphael Samuel. Many photographs, for

example, show women as culturally emancipated and economically independent

as a consequence of their contributions to the war effort .

Popular visual culture is routinely characterised as dynamic, commercial and

vulgar. The material presented herewill, we hope, confound this orthodoxy and

reveal an unexpected alignment between modernist design practice, progressive

politics and visual sophistication during WW2 and up to 1951. The idea of a national

resistance to the style and substance of Modernism will be refuted.

The form and substance of socialvision allowed the development of a popular

visual culture, traditionally associated with consumer capitalism, to move beyond

the siren calls of advertsing rhetoric and the appeal to individualistic consumption.

Socialvision developed as a regional and collective alternative to the metropolitan

and individualistic projection of consumer capitalism. At the same time, the project

rejected the straightforward social realist descriptions of collective solidarity and

class consciousness. The myth making implicit in the project is complex,

sophisticated and idealistic.

The myths of the British Home Front are projected against a backdrop of the modest

Anderson shelter. A family shelter combining something of the domestic and the

outdoor in the best traditions of garden shed, beach hut and allotment.

The emergence of socialvision within the context of WW2 is specifically British. It is

in contrast to the mythologies of the American Home Front that were used to rehabilitate

the guiding expertise of capital and management.

The site begins the study of the visual projection of collectivity in Britain in the hope

of identifying a potential alternative to the hegemony of brands and celebrity in our

contemporary visual culture.

Paul Rennie

March 2005