Mass Photography ─ Collective Histories of Everyday Life

With increasingly accessible camera technology available, crowdsourced collective histories of everyday life, which harness amateur photographers to secure a snapshot of a single day, abound like never before. Mass Photography assesses the potential of these popular moment-in-time projects by examining their historical predecessors. It views for the first time the vast photographic collections resulting from such projects, analysing their structures and systems, their aims and objectives, and their claims and promises, using interviews with an array of the experts & amateurs involved. The central case study is of 55,000 photographs submitted to One Day for Life in 1987, which aimed, in its own time, to be ‘the biggest photographic event the world had ever seen’.

Annebella Pollen is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design and Director of Historical and Critical Studies at the College of Arts and Humanities, University of Brighton. She is co-editor, with Charlotte Nicklas, of Dress History: New Directions on Method and Practice (2015).