Mass-illumination: Mass-observation and the dialectical image as cultural critique, 1937-1940

The British Mass-Observation movement was founded in January 1937 as an independent social research program that strove to document ordinary everyday life in Britain. Its organizers hoped that this act of societal self-reflection would help ameliorate the inter-war national identity crisis facing Britain at the time. In this way, the project was inevitably shaped by the particular historical moment in which it was situated. Mass-Observation drew on a startling blend of creative information gathering techniques and theoretical ideas. It was primarily concerned with observing its subjects through surveillance, photography, and film---and subsequently conceiving its subjects within a unique visual framework. A close reading of Mass-Observation's work reveals that they deployed a "dialectical" way of seeing the modern world that was actually epistemologically concomitant with the German literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. The subsequent parallels between Mass-Observation and Benjamin force us to reconsider how we think of early twentieth century British cultural thought.