Worktown Holiday Rituals

Photographs produced for the Humphrey Spender John Marriott Scholarship for Documentary Photography, exhibited at Bolton Museum in 2010, and now held in the museum's collections.

I contextualised my photographs of holiday rituals in Bolton against a selection of Humphrey Spender's 1930s photographs. The process of research into Bolton Museum's Worktown archive for this exhibition demonstrated that Spender's photographs were not accurately catalogued and that both factual and interpretive inaccuracies had crept into established histories of both social documentary photography and the early Mass Observation project. These discoveries were expanded through my subsequent PhD research.