title: Forgotten images still resisting time: writing the London bomb damage photograph archive 1940 - 1945
Creators: name: McArthur, Jane
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: images
subject: archive
subject: montage
subject: fragment
subject: bomb damage
subject: London
subject: Blitz
subject: Second World War
subject: oral history
subject: mapping

description: This thesis is centred on an un-researched, uncatalogued archive of captioned, censored press photographs of bomb-damaged London 1940 – 1945. The prints were retained during the Second World War by the Ministry of Information as a reference library before being accessioned into the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 1946. The thesis takes a particular image-led approach to researching and writing with and from these photographs which are positioned not as merely illustrative or evidentiary, but as revelatory, complex, multivalent, material objects carrying the capacity to extend their reach beyond the archive to resonate with other images, other times, other places. Bringing together photographs depicting the ruination of homes and lives, the thesis challenges notions of images as representative, complete or iconic to instead correlate their temporal, fragmentary nature with the disintegrating experiences of war. This approach traces a trajectory of theoretical writing as image and writing with images from Walter Benjamin to Eduardo Cadava and Georges Didi-Huberman. Also realised as image-text dialogues comprising close readings of an image with a text, works by these scholars are brought into correspondence with writings by Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Ruth Berlau, Ulrich Baer and Esther Leslie, forming part of the image-text montage that is this thesis. Beginning with Allan Sekula’s writing on photograph archives, each chapter shows a particular aspect of the archive and its territories, differently reflecting the relations individual images have to history, to lived experience, to the city in which these archival images came into being and in which until 2020 they were housed. Now removed to the Cambridgeshire countryside, the connection between the images and the formerly bomb-damaged streets in which the archive was located is severed, resulting in the loss of a particular way of working described in this thesis. From this viewpoint, the archive’s origins are traced, charting in image and text the first history of the wartime censorship of photographs and the transformation of the collections from working reference library to museum archive. The archive’s position in London is reflected in word and image, which also includes mapping spoken and written accounts I collected from those who witnessed the bombing in the archive’s locale, onto the streets surrounding IWM, directly connecting lived experiences to the location of the archive and its contents. Employing a particular approach to montage which safeguards the photograph’s fragmentary nature, images showing the realities of aerial warfare inflicted upon mostly un-named people depicted in un-named streets are for the first time also brought together in this thesis with staged propaganda shots and in doing so, reveal the nuances of civilian experiences. Framed by Jacques Derrida’s essay on memory and blindness, the still extant British wartime visual rhetoric of the stoical survivor is challenged by examining the archive’s forgotten images in relation to German and British post-war photo books.