Aesthetics, Industry and Innovation in Twentieth Century Photography: The Ilford Archive

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This research investigates practices of technical innovation in the work of the Ilford Ltd. Photographic company and early colour photography enterprises during WWI and in the interwar period. It explores how new aesthetic and technical practices developed between 1914 and 1939, and the impact on the visual, sensual 'economy' of the period. It situates Ilford's work with photographic chemistry in relation to other developments in the period relating to colour photography and photosensitivity, and in relation to changes in photographic practice and style. It looks at how technical and aesthetic developments were designed to address specific problems or needs arising from war and from economic changes, such as the impact of the 1929 US stock market crash, and new business and retail practices. The project addresses an area of photographic history that has been little studied, mainly in the context of business history, although there have been useful photographic studies of companies such as Kodak, Corbis and Polaroid that this project will draw on for methodological insights. The aim is to explore the specific connections between corporate, everyday and avant-garde aesthetic and technical experimentation in photography in Britain in this period. A broader theoretical aim is to develop an understanding of how aesthetic and technical expertise embodied by human participants is transferred into technical apparatuses, and how it in turn re-emerges as human-technical practices. At stake in this work is the larger question of how technical images impact on everyday sensory experience. The project aims to be field-defining research that produces a new body of knowledge about the under-researched Ilford archive and at the same time contributes to new and developing approaches in photography history and photography theory. These new approaches move away from older analyses of a break between analogue and digital image to a more nuanced understanding of the material, industrial and technological basis of twentieth-century photographic practices. Accordingly, this research takes account of the long technical development of photography and its close relation to other technical and engineered systems, without losing sight of questions of aesthetics and interpretation, which tend to be sidelined in historical and social-science accounts of technical change. The other main aim of this project is to develop my research leadership skills and capacity. The project will enhance my own research skills and standing, and my ability to mentor junior colleagues. One way in which I ensure this is through a series of masterclasses or workshops for early career researchers and postgraduate students across different institutions and disciplines. The research project will also provide the basis for an international conference across the fields of photography and film studies. In this, I will work collaboratively with colleagues from my own and other universities, and with photographic practitioners and industry participants. The aim will be to create dialogue and to work alongside other research leaders in my university and outside, to actively raise the quality of the research environment in this interdisciplinary area, in particular focussing on the relationship between the material-industrial infrastructure of photography and film manufacture, and the intangible and aesthetic aspects of photography and film.