"SLUMS IN THE SKY: HOW PHOTOGRAPHY KILLED THE DESIRE FOR MID-CENTURY, URBAN SOCIAL HOUSING"
This research has been generously supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and by the Margaret and Marshall Bartlett Research Fellowship Fund.
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My PhD project seeks to understand the role of photography in the demise of mass social housing and in the so-called “death” of architectural modernism more broadly. Using the rise and fall of Brutalist social housing in post-war Britain as a case study, I argue that photography was essential in shaping public opinion against both Brutalism and social housing by evidencing pseudo-scientific theories of environmental determinism (Alice Coleman Utopia on Trial, 1985; Oscar Newman, Defensible Space, 1972). The subject of my research is mid-century British architectural photography, as well as critical fine art street photography and photojournalism from Britain and Ireland, contextualized within a longer tradition of muckraking photojournalism and social documentary dating back to the late 1800s. My intervention brings the perspectives of postmodern photographic theorists to bear upon the historiography of British architectural modernism.
Just as photographs may have killed a movement for better social housing, I argue that they may also swiftly renew that interest. By exploring the ways in which photography has historically conditioned our vision of poverty and housing insecurity, I argue that we can learn to read photography "against the grain" and rethink how we visualize both poverty and the housing crisis more broadly.
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My PhD project seeks to understand the role of photography in the demise of mass social housing and in the so-called “death” of architectural modernism more broadly. Using the rise and fall of Brutalist social housing in post-war Britain as a case study, I argue that photography was essential in shaping public opinion against both Brutalism and social housing by evidencing pseudo-scientific theories of environmental determinism (Alice Coleman Utopia on Trial, 1985; Oscar Newman, Defensible Space, 1972). The subject of my research is mid-century British architectural photography, as well as critical fine art street photography and photojournalism from Britain and Ireland, contextualized within a longer tradition of muckraking photojournalism and social documentary dating back to the late 1800s. My intervention brings the perspectives of postmodern photographic theorists to bear upon the historiography of British architectural modernism.
Just as photographs may have killed a movement for better social housing, I argue that they may also swiftly renew that interest. By exploring the ways in which photography has historically conditioned our vision of poverty and housing insecurity, I argue that we can learn to read photography "against the grain" and rethink how we visualize both poverty and the housing crisis more broadly.
