PhD in Cultural Studies, 2023, the University of Edinburgh and the Imperial War Museum London, supported by an AHRC CDP award. The thesis title is “Forgotten Images Still Resisting Time: Writing the London Bomb Damage Photograph Archive 1940–1945”. Current research addresses the archive in the city, writing with images, and the use of montage as an active research methodology and as a means of display. Research with Second World War London bomb damage photographs also challenges notions of images as representative, complete or iconic, instead correlating their temporal, fragmentary nature with the disintegrating experiences of war. MSc by Research, Cultural Studies, University of Edinburgh, 2012. Curator specialising in public art in healthcare since 2005
The place or territory in which an archive is housed shapes our understanding of the material discovered there and informs the subsequent direction of research. Derived from Allan Sekula’s discussion of the image territory of photograph archives, this paper develops Sekula’s concept in relation to researching an overlooked archive of censored and captioned bomb damage press photographs taken in London during the Second World War.
Beginning in The Imperial War Museum’s photograph archive reading room which was situated until 2020 in the city whose wartime ruination the bomb damage photographs record, this paper describes their territories, showing how the archive is not solely defined by its taxonomic and institutional context. Instead, from the mediative space of the reading room, new interconnecting temporal, historical and locational territories are traced, revealing other histories in both the archive and the city.
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