| abstract |
This dissertation examines the origins of community resistance to mass social
housing in Britain, focusing particularly on the role which photography played in shaping
desires for home and community in the immediate post-war period. In this
interdisciplinary project, I'm considering how social documentary and fine art
photography magnified the perceived failures of modern "streets-in-the-sky" social
housing and validated the social stigma of the council flat dweller, ultimately reshaping
social housing policy and killing production in periods of fiscal crisis beginning in the
mid-1970s. My research suggests that a complex visual ecosystem helped to "kill" public
support for state housing initiatives by "othering" Brutalist architecture and maligning
council housing residents as aberrant. Photography, abstracted from the contexts of its
production and responsive to stylistic change and broader theoretical convulsions, often
reinforced misleading theories of environmental determinism in ways that aligned with
parallel political and commercial interests.
While the conception and changing perception of modern British social housing is
a central focus of this research, the dissertation also contributes to the history and theory
of British and American documentary photography. By taking a longer view of the slum
in and through its photographic representation, I discuss the importance of class status in
the construction and reception of slum and social housing photography, noting the ways
in which slum photography implicitly invokes normative conceptions of home and the
family by their absence. Further, an interdisciplinary approach reveals the formal
permeability of modern architectural photography, which was sensitive to changing
trends in fine art and documentary street photography and to the postmodern reappraisal
of photography's so-called "truth value" beginning in the late 1960s.
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