Photographic Representations of Urban Communities in Postwar Britain and the Emergence of Collaborative Alternatives

This chapter examines how photography and images of cities have contributed to debates about urban and social change in postwar Britain. It uses three short case studies to examine the changing nature of photography and the role and agency of local communities in the creation and circulation of images of their environments. The first of these examines how photography by artist Nigel Henderson after the Second World War informed key architectural critiques of modernism and reconstruction. The second looks at how photography used in charity campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s recast cities as spaces of decay and urban inhabitants as passive victims of their environments. The third section considers a community-led intervention in planning debates in the 1970s and 1980s in which community photography played an important role. The chapter argues that photography has served multiple functions in debates about urbanism in postwar Britain, which largely mirrors wider shifts in debates about participation in urban policy and planning.