Carlton Hill: the children of Brighton’s displaced community
Exhibition at Jubilee Library, Brighton, 14th-19th September 2015 and Site specific projection and soundscape event at Circus Street, Brighton.
‘Compelling evidence’: mobilizing the Carlton Hill photographic archive
Julia Winckler
Abstract
Our project bridges the field of social work with the field of photography and archival scholarship and our interdisciplinary research team includes scholars from within social sciences and visual studies. We explore connected, transnational histories through a cultural framework and try to reconcile different viewpoints by working across historical spaces. In this paper, we focused on a single British case study, the Carlton Hill collection in Brighton that documented the area prior to it being demolished under the pretext of ‘slum’ clearance. We presented a small number of visual interventions and activities that were timed to coincide with the IVM conference in Brighton in September 2015. The collection continues to live on; the photographs, in their manifestations as physical objects or online images, continue to communicate through their itinerant languages. Our research shows that archival objects do not stay in place, the object and the auspices shift over time. New reworkings become possible, along with new sets of questions. Visual methods facilitate and heighten interventions and interferences, they dislodge familiar readings and holding spaces, and reopen those relations anew.
Keywords
Carlton Hill photographic archive, Brighton Mobilizing photographs, activating the archive through intervention, Slum clearance in the 20th century Britain/Canada.
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