Abstract
This chapter analyses the conventions of rural representation in photographic and film images from the collections at the Museum of English Rural Life (University of Reading, UK). Their iconography is in dialogue with stated and unstated assumptions about the role of the English countryside, for example in relation to food production, the preservation of rural life and rural heritage, the role of technology and patterns of labour. The people visible in the MERL images were the agents of change, and its beneficiaries and victims. To study these images opens up a new way of understanding modernity and technology, changes in rural work, leisure and heritage.
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Bibliography
Books and Book Chapters
Barrell John, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
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Exhibition
Hockney David, ‘A Bigger Picture’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 21 January to 9 April 2012.
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Anstey Edgar and Elton Arthur, Housing Problems, 1935.
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Acknowledgements
Jonathan Bignell is grateful to Kate Arnold-Forster (Director of the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL)) and Ollie Douglas (Assistant Curator of MERL) for scholarship that underpins his contributions to this chapter.
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Bignell, J., Burchardt, J. (2017). Agents, Beneficiaries and Victims: Picturing People on the Land. In: Haigron, D. (eds) The English Countryside. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53273-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53273-8_3
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