Photography of Protest and Community: The Radical Collectives of the 1970s

Abstract

In February 1976, the inaugural issue of the photography journal Camerawork ran a ‘Statement of Aims’ on its back cover, spelling out the ambitions of its freshly minted editorial team. Dedicated to forging new connections between photography and politics, the statement’s authors declaim that ‘Our central concern in photography [... ] is not “Is it art?” but, “Who is it for?”’ Photographic historian Noni Stacey draws readers’ attention to this particular statement early on in her book, viewing it as a keystone to understanding the lasting contributions of a number of photography collectives that emerged in 1970s London. These collectives, and the development of a mode of photographic production that Stacey identifies as ‘community photography’, are the subject of this archivally rich publication. Indeed, the great strength of Stacey’s book derives from the way she delves deep into the pragmatic, and often unresolved, debates of these practitioners themselves as they sought to build a politically viable photographic practice within Britain’s marginalised and underserved communities. Across six chapters, Stacey focuses on the most notable groups engaged in community photography during this period: those associated with the Half Moon Photography Workshop and affiliated journal Camerawork; the Hackney Flashers; the Exit Photography Group; the North Paddington Community Darkroom (NPCD); and the Blackfriars Photography Project (BPP). What readers encounter is a series of detailed microhistories that together sketch the contours of a practice that sparked heated critical and theoretical debates among politically committed photographers that extended far beyond its initial point of emergence. Photography of Protest and Community: The Radical Collectives of the 1970s had its genesis as a doctoral thesis, and the archival research and oral histories compiled by Stacey will remain a lasting contribution of this text. Stacey has a remarkable ability to let the tensions, contradictions and difficulties encountered by her protagonists remain a central part of the history, underscoring the rich complexity of community photography. By quoting her subjects liberally throughout the book, Stacey gives her readers the opportunity to grapple with a new corpus of primary sources. Above all, the approach indicates Stacey’s interest in the specificity of photographic practice rather than the theoretical battles that typically accompany such radical practices. In this way, scholars on the subject will view Stacey’s book as a welcome complement to other studies of the era’s politicised documentary practitioners, such as artist and curator Jorge Ribalta’s Not Yet: On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, 1972–1991 (2015). Chapter one lays the broad historical and methodological groundwork for the case studies that follow, beginning by distinguishing ‘community photography’ from other traditions of documentary practice. At its core, Stacey’s definition underscores the desire of its practitioners to shorten the distance between observer and observed through their embrace of alternative modes of production, distribution and reception of photographic work, as well as the collective, anti-hierarchical structures used to organise these efforts. Stacey’s historical argument is also pertinent to comprehending the political outlook of her book’s protagonists. She situates the development of these collectives in an era in which the legislative and representational politics of England failed to create the ‘classless’ society dreamed of in the 1960s. Stacey posits her subjects’ DIY, community-centred approach as a reaction to these political and economic shortcomings in addition to their general mistrust of the fractured political parties of the Left. It is also here that Stacey announces this community-oriented spirit as her own, explaining her aspirations for the book to be accessible to practitioners outside the academy. Subsequent chapters shift to a series of detailed accounts of specific collectives, venues and approaches that define community photography, beginning with the Half Moon Gallery (HMG) and associated figures in chapter two. The HMG was situated in the Whitechapel district of London’s East End, a neighbourhood defined by its working-class and immigrant communities who since the 1930s had been targets of reformist policy and documentary production through the government’s Mass Observation Project. Stacey pays special attention to Wendy Ewald, the gallery’s founder, and her desire to democratise the administering of the Reviews