1. Turner, W.J., Exmoor Village (London, 1947).Google Scholar

2. Ibid., pp. 108–0.

3. Ibid., p. 12.

4. Ibid., pp. 17–8.

5. Lee, D., Hindesight (Dublin, 1993).Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 12.

7. Ibid., p. 18.

8. Ibid., p. 42 quoting Clare Cryan, and p. 18. One must remember, however, that colour printing always involves subjective decisions about colour balance.

9. Ibid., p. 18.

10. See, for example, Davis, K.F., An American Century of Photography from Dry-Plate to Digital (Kansas City, Missouri, 1995), pp. 116–127.Google Scholar There are a number of histories dealing with the changing technology and various movements and fashions in photography see, for instance, Newhall, Beaumont, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (London, 1964)Google Scholar; Jeffrey, Ian, Photography, A Concise History (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Greenough, S., Snyder, J.. Travis, D., Westerbeck, C., On the Art of Fixing a Shadow (National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, 1989)Google Scholar, which accompanied a touring exhibition of the same name.

11. Lange, D., Dorothea Lange, Portraits of a Lifetime (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

12. Hurley, F.J., Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Social Documentary Photography in the Thirtes (Baton Rouge, 1972).Google Scholar The committed, subjective approach of this work in the 1930s would have distanced it until recently from the work of social anthropologists, who tried to minimise their moral or personal involvement in their work. More recent approaches to anthropology and debates about subjectivity now allow us to feel professional kinship with as well as admiration for this work.

13. Davis, , American Century, p. 121.Google Scholar

14. Spender, H., Lensman Photographs 1932–52 (London, 1987).Google Scholar

15. Mass Observation Archive, Box 6, File A, Letter from researcher, 11.4.44; letter to researcher, 4.4.44. I was later to learn that Mr Berry worked for John Hinde's father, who was a Director of Clarks Shoes. Mr Berry was the Advertising Manager of Clarks (about whose factory in Somerset, Turner eulogises in ‘The Return from Luccombe’). Mr Berry was to do a footwear survey in the school, and his associate, Mr Underwood, from the pattern room, measured some of the children's feet. (Conversation between Mr Berry and J. Sarsby, 4.4.95) Exmoor Village is not strong on footwear data, although there is a shoe survey in the archive (I am grateful to Alun Howkins for mentioning it to me). This was obviously a piece of market research, and not part of the ‘anthropology of ourselves”.

16. Bryan, Izzard, Exmoor Village, HTV for Channel 4, 1988.Google Scholar

17. Ibid.

18. John Hinde in conversation with Jacqueline Sarsby, 10.12.94.

19. Another publisher, William Collins, published Britain in Pictures, which included among many other titles, English Farming by Sir E. John Russell, British Craftsmen by Thomas Hennell and British Photographers, by Cecil Beaton (1944), all also produced by Adprint. Beaton did not think much of colour photographers at the time, but the book contained a colour photograph by John Hinde of the ‘Hybrid Tea Rose, Ophelia’. The general editor of the series was W.J. Turner, the ‘author’ of Exmoor Village.

20. A similar undertaking, in many ways, was the Exhibition of Modern British Crafts, which Muriel Rose took to the United States for the British Council in 1942. The aesthetic possibilities of agricultural hand-tools had been revealed to the art world in Oliver Hill's display in the exhibition of British Industrial Art, at Dorland Hall, London, in 1933, and what are now termed ‘vernacular crafts’ were included in a number of national exhibitions, including one to New Zealand in 1947 and the Festival of Britain in 1951. (Alan Powers first brought the Oliver Hill display to my attention in his lecture on the architect at Cirencester in 1997. I owe to Tanya Harrod my knowledge of the British Council Exhibition of Rural Handicrafts from Great Britain which went to New Zealand. My thanks to her for many informative and enjoyable conversations about all these exhibitions.) In ‘The Country’, the Festival of Britain exhibition showed the mechanisation of farming and boasted the involvement of science: ‘the ideal hen of to-day is, throughout her entire life, just a single item in a great machine’, but contrasted this with a continuing rural way of life which included the cricket match, the W.I. and craftsmen wo made hedges, hurdles, thatch, harness and baskets (Ian, Cox, The South Bank Exhibition (H.M.S.O., 1951), pp. 18–19.)Google Scholar

21. John Hinde in conversation with J. Sarsby, 10.12.94.

22. Conversation as above.

23. Conversation as above.

24. John Collier and Malcolm Collier have alerted anthropologist-photographers to the importance of the arrangement and use of space: ‘The spatial configuration of otherwise ordinary objects, common in mass society, may often reflect or express the cultural patterns and values of distinct cultural groups or may provide insight into the well-being of the inhabitants’. (Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (Albuquerque, 1986)).Google Scholar

25. For the importance of small cameras and, in particular, the Leica, see Newhall, , History of Photography, chapter 11, ‘The Instant Vision”, and Greenough, S. et al. Fixing a Shadow, pp. 241–2.Google Scholar

26. John Hinde in conversation with Jacqueline Sarsby, 10.12.94.

27. This is suggested in a planning document, ‘General Remarks on Series “British Ways of Life”, vol. 1. A Wessex Village’, by F. Compton Mackenzie, 15 April 1944. Mass-Observation Archive, Town and District Survey Box 6 File A. This document dates from an early stage in the planning of the project when F. Compton Mackenzie was going to be the author of Exmoor Village and the book had another working title. Eventually, the real authors, as Alun Howkins has pointed out, were the researchers, whose reports Turner used almost without comment.

28. Lartigue, Jacques-Henri, Man Livre de Photographic (Paris, 1977)Google Scholar; The Photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartígue (New York, 1963), with essay by Starkowski, J.Google Scholar; Lartigue, J.-H.: Les Aiitochromes De J.-H. Lartigue 1912–27, trans. Coe, Brian (London, 1981).Google Scholar

29. Frank Sutcliffe writing in his column “Photography Notes” in the Yorkshire Weekly Post, 14 August 1926, as quoted in Hiley, M., Frank Sutcliffe: Photographer of Whitby (London and Bedford, 1974).Google Scholar See also Jeffrey, I., Photography, pp. 71–72,81, 88.Google Scholar

30. Lee, , Hindesight, p. 18.Google Scholar

31. Sutcliffe, F., ‘Photography Notes’ in the Yorkshire Weekly Post, 24 Oct. 1914, quoted in Hiley, Frank Sutcliffe.Google Scholar

32. See, for example, Harker, M.E.The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain 1892–1910 (London, 1979; New York, 1980).Google Scholar

33. Charles, Holme (ed.), Art in Photography, the Studio (London, Paris and New York, 1905)Google Scholar especially Clive Holland, ‘Artistic Photography in Great Britain”, p. 3. John Berger asserts that, ‘Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them’, which may be taken as the opposite view, minimising the choices which the professional photographer makes at every stage in selecting equipment, taking, processing and printing a photograph (Berger, J. and Mohr, J., Another Way of Telling (Cambridge, 1989), p. 96).Google Scholar

34. John Taylor has described a similar phenomenon when working class experience is celebrated or, as he puts it, ‘becomes heritage’ in Museums in the Midlands and the North: ‘Through the experience, visitors find a past which was primitive in comparison with their own times, yet was homely, straightforward and decent’. (in A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist's Imagination) (Manchester, 1994), p. 248.Google Scholar

35. Saville, J., Rural Depopulation in England and Wales 1851–1951 (London, 1957).Google Scholar

36. I have described the growth of one of these groups, between the Wars, in Sarsby, J., ‘Alfred Powell: Idealism and Realism in the Cotswolds’, Journal of Design History, December, 1997.Google Scholar

37. It is intriguing that the promotion of crafts as in some sense the essence of the countryside (thatching, weaving, pottery and fabric-printing) was accompanied in the 1930s and 1940s by an enthusiasm for the industrialisation of agriculture, without any sense of incongruity. Leonard and Dorothy Elmhurst at Darlington Hall epitomise this, running their ‘efficient’ poultry farm and their modern dairy farm, on ‘economic’ lines, and at the same time commissioning the hand-weaver, Rita Beales, to make the President and Mrs Roosevelt a set of table mats and napkins as a special present, ‘that would represent the most perfect British craftsmanship within a given field’. (Quoted in Patricia, Baines, A Linen Legacy: Rita Beales 1889–1987, the Crafts Study Centre, Holburne Museum (Bath, 1989), p. 27.Google Scholar) What saved the indoor crafts, of course, was the fact that they were taken over by middle class people with other sources of income.

38. See Strathern, M., Kinship at the Core (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar, and Ahmed, Akbar S. and Mynors, J.B., ‘Fowlmere, Roundheads, Rambo and Rivalry in an English Village Today’, Anthropology Today, vol. 10; no. 5, Oct. 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Curry, N., Countryside, Recreation, Access and Land Use Planning (London, 1994).Google Scholar

40. Ibid.

41. Mass-Observation File Report 2487. Box 6 File A.

42. Shoard, M., The Theft of the Countryside (London, 1980).Google Scholar