Women in Wartime: Dress Studies from Picture Post 1938–1945
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Howell, Geraldine. "Notes." Women in Wartime: Dress Studies from Picture Post 1938–1945. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. 167–203. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350000957.0005>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 06:01 UTC. Copyright © Geraldine Howell 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. NOTES Introduction 1 The Editors of Time Life Books, Photojournalism (Time Life Books, 1971), p. 96. 2 There is a considerable body of information on this topic. Much of it derives from post– Second World War scholarship and from more recent material that also addresses the impact on photo-narratives of twenty-first-century digital medias. See for example: J. H. Newton, The Burden of Visual Truth: The Role of Photojournalism in Mediating Reality (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001); J. H. Newton, ‘Photojournalism: Do People Matter? Then Photojournalism Matters’, Journalism Practice, Vol. 3, No. 2, Routledge, Taylor and Frances, 2009, pp. 233–243; The Editors of Time Life Books, Photojournalism. 3 M. Hallett, Stefan Lorant: Godfather of Photojournalism (Scarecrow Press Inc., 2006), p. 70. 4 Stefan Lorant from the Modern Photography Annual 1938, as cited in Hallett, Stefan Lorant, p. 72. 5 Ibid. 6 K. Hutton, Speaking Likeness (Focal Press, 1947), p. 10. 7 Ibid., p. 10. 8 Ibid., p. 12. 9 Ibid., p. 14. 10 C. Osman (ed.), ‘Kurt Hutton on Naturalness’ (1935) in ‘Fifty Years of Picture Magazines’, Creative Camera (Coo Press Ltd., 1982), p. 594. 11 Picture Post, 7 February 1942, pp. 24–25. 12 Ibid., p. 25. 13 This may well have been because the editor, where appropriate, would include photographic stories or stills from photo agencies. Ties with the American Time Life archive, for example, were established early on. 14 See ‘A Day with Gracie’, Picture Post, 29 October 1938, pp. 12–16 and p. 70. This story on singer and actress Gracie Fields is a particularly good example. 15 J. Hartley and E. Rennie, ‘About a Girl: Fashion Photography as Photojournalism’, Journalism Theory, Practice and Criticism, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2004, p. 463. Gidal went on to say it was acceptable, however, to repeat a scene that had taken place, ibid. 16 In Speaking Likeness Hutton explained his dislike of flashlight as ‘the arch enemy of naturalness’ in some detail. See Hutton, Speaking Likeness, p. 17. 17 Robert Kee in The Picture Post Album: A Fiftieth Anniversary Collection (Barrie and Jenkins Ltd., 1994) remarked that Picture Post ‘nominally. had no overall political stance, or rather 168 NOTES no overall national party-political stance. It was certainly anti-Nazi from the beginning’. In Kee’s view, Lorant and Hopkinson took a ‘radical humanist approach to everything’ and all politics became ‘subordinate’ to this philosophy within the paper. Anne Scott-James, Woman’s Editor of Picture Post from 1941, believed Hopkinson ‘made the paper increasingly political and controversial, gradually building up a campaign for a more equal Britain after the war’. A. Scott-James, Sketches from a Life (Michael Joseph, 1993), p. 79. 18 Picture Post, 19 November 1939, p. 4. 19 All these features will be returned to in future chapters. 20 Picture Post was not aligned to a specific political party. Although the majority of the staff professed themselves either Labour supporters or liberal in outlook, Edward Hulton – the magazine’s proprietor and publisher – was a staunch member of the Conservative party and Picture Post journalist MacDonald Hastings was also right wing. Picture Post journalist Bert Lloyd was a communist as was guest writer Tom Wintringham. 21 While Lorant established the founding principles and orientation on which Picture Post was based, it would be Tom Hopkinson who would consolidate this approach as editor after Lorant’s departure for America in 1940. 22 Hitler became German Chancellor on 30 January 1933. In August 1934, on the death of President Hindenburg, Hitler took his place and declared himself Fuhrer. Many books recount Hitler’s rise to power during the 1930s. This work has specifically used: F. McDonough Hitler, Chamberlain and Appeasement (Cambridge University Press, 2002); P. Brendon The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (Jonathan Cape, 2000). 23 Hallett, Stefan Lorant, p. 32. Hallett also cites Wickham Steed’s suggestions in the Observer (28 April 1935) that the patriotism of the Catholic publishing company and the competition with Nazi media that their papers offered might account for Lorant’s treatment. His rejection of funds from a Nazi sympathizer could also have caused him to be a target. See p. 55. For more on Lorant’s life at this time see pp. 19–46. Hallett has made an extensive study of Lorant becoming his biographer at Lorant’s request. He provides a comprehensive account of Lorant’s life and career with detail not available elsewhere. This chapter is much in his debt. 24 Ibid., p. 39. 25 Victor Gollancz would start the anti-fascist Left Book Club in 1936. See R. Overy The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939 (Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 304–307. 26 Hallett, Stefan Lorant, p. 33. 27 As quoted in M. Hallett, Stefan Lorant: Godfather of Photojournalism (Scarecrow Press Inc., 2006), p. 87. For more on Webb, see ibid., p. 67, footnote 4. 28 Lorant’s story entitled ‘Back to the Middle Ages’ is a powerful example. It presented a sequence of photographs revealing the horrifying persecution of the Jewish people in Germany and Austria as a result of the shooting of a German official in Paris by a young Jewish man whose parents had been arrested in Germany. Tom Hopkinson saw the story as ‘an attempt to dramatize photographically the monstrous crime which had been – and still was – taking place in the middle of Europe, in the heart of our Christian civilization’. Writing in 1970 he still regarded it as ‘the finest example of the use of photographs for political effect’. See T. Hopkinson (ed.), Picture Post 1938–1950 (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1970), p. 38, p. 11. The story appeared in Picture Post, 26 November 1938, pp. 14–19. 29 Kaye Webb in conversation with Alan Dien (Library of the National Sound Archive, Oral History and British Photography) as quoted in Hallett, Stefan Lorant, p. 87. 30 See P. Quennell (ed.), Mayhew’s London (Bracken Books, 1984), p. 20. Sociological enquiry continued in works such as Seebohm Rowntree’s A Study of Town Life published in 1901 NOTES 169 (Macmillan 1901 and Policy Press, 2001) or access online at www.archive.org, and Charles Booth’s study of poverty in London, London Life and Labour (Macmillan, 1902–1903, and RareBooksClub, 2012). Rowntree focused on the disadvantaged of York and later revisited the area from 1936 to provide a comparative study published as Poverty and Progress (Longmans, Greene and Co., 1941). For further information on Charles Booth visit www. booth.lse.ac.uk for access to archive material stored at Senate House. For an excellent overview of later sociological enquiry see M. Roiser, ‘Social Psychology and Social Concern in 1930s Britain’, in G. C. Bunn, A. D. Lovie, and G. D. Richards (eds), Psychology in Britain: Historical Essays and Personal Reflections (British Psychological Society Books, 2001), pp. 169–187. 31 John Thomson had already travelled widely in the Far East between 1862 and 1872. The photographs from these expeditions are now housed at the Wellcome Library and can be viewed via www.wellcomelibrary.org. Site accessed 4 April 2016: 15:46. 32 Street Life in London by Adolphe Smith and John Thomson can be read online at the LSE digital library. The complete collection of thirty-six images are also available here. See both at wwwdigital.library.lse.ac.uk. Site accessed 4 April 2016: 15:53. Thomson made the transition from taking anthropological photographs abroad to ones at home that pre-empts the same focus of Mass Observation. Also of interest is Jack London’s People of the Abyss (Create SpaceIPP, 2013) illustrated, in this edition, with London’s photographs of poverty in London in 1902. 33 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (Penguin Classic, 1998). 34 Hine worked on his Ellis island photographs from 1905 to 1906 and for the National Child Labour Committee from 1908 to 1916; see H. Gernsheim, Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends 1839–1960 (Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1991), p. 111, p. 238. See also the New York Public Library Digital Collections, Lewis Wickes Hine: Documentary Photographs, 1905–1938, which provides examples of Hine’s work at www.digitalcollections.nypl.org 35 H. Gernsheim, Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends 1839–1960 (Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1962), p. 216, p. 220. A collection of over two-and-a-half-thousand FSA photographs, including work by Lange and Evans, can be accessed via the New York Public Library at www.digitalcollections.nypl.org 36 E. Caldwell and M. Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (University of Georgia Press, USA, 1994). First published in 1937 by Viking Press. 37 The idea that social boundaries based on class caused gulfs between communities difficult to cross, and that within broad classes there were nuances of class distinction that also created divisions, becomes a theme in the work of writers such as George Orwell and J. B. Priestly, the material from Mass Observation and in the photography of Humphrey Spender. 38 T. Harrison and C. Madge as quoted by J. Mulford (ed.) in H. Spender, Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England 1937–38 (Falling Wall Press, 1982), p.