Exmoor Village Revisited: Mass-Observation's ‘Anthropology of Ourselves’, the ‘Feel Good Factor’ in Wartime Colour Photography and the Photograph as Art or Social Document

Abstract

In 1988, HTV made a series of programmes about a Somerset village called Luccombe. Their starting point was the Mass-Observation survey carried out over forty years before and described in Exmoor Village. No mention was made of the larger project - the ‘wholesome’ British export, for which the survey and perhaps even more importantly, the photographs, were commissioned. The difficulties of producing and reproducing fine-quality colour photographs at that time, however, suggest that the social investigators and the photographer were pursuing widely differing goals. The different approaches of social documentary photography and pictorial photography may not be obvious in a beautiful print, embedded in an anthropological text, but the use of photographs, which were essentially reconstructions of idealised village life disguised as documents, indicates how much importance the Ministry of Information attached to exporting the image of the wholesome, ‘traditional', English rural community.