Good Friday Pilgrimage

On Good Friday a lot of people from Bolton and the surrounding area walk up Rivington Pike to the north of the town. There is a small fair selling things like candyfloss and balloons- a bit incongruous on top of a hill. Some people had brought hard boiled eggs to roll, whilst local teenagers had brought hard boiled eggs to throw at each other.

Exhibition at Bolton Museum

photographing the natives

 

 

A Dutchman once told me that his country had no uneasy relationship with its colonial past, that in fact it had no colonies and was no where near as bad as 'your country'. He was talking shit; leaving aside the bizarre festival of  Black Peter and the whole being the centre of international slave trade thing; the new god, wikipedia has them down with eleven colonies. This relationship is explored at the amazing Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, which may tread an uneasy line but is indisputably entertaining. What's this got to do with 1930's Bolton? Ethnography, anthropology and photographing the natives. 

How to hold a Surrealist Exhibition 1

Marcel Duchamp 'Mile of String' 1942

The Man who listened to Britain

A documentary film about Humphrey Jennings, one of the founders of Mass Observation, who went on to make some remarkable war films for the Crown Film Unit during World War 2. As the documentary observes they are intensely patriotic visions of a time when  Britain became almost a socialist state during the levelling of the Blitz.

Christmas Eve Shopping

Tom Harrisson's suggestions for initial Mass-Observation study

Behaviour of people at war memorials.

Shouts and gestures of motorists.

The aspidistra cult.

Anthropology of football pools.

Bathroom behaviour.

Beards, armpits, eyebrows.

Anti-Semitism.

Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke.

Funerals and undertakers.

Female taboos about eating.

The private lives of midwives.