The University of Westminster and the Museum of the Home (MotH) are delighted to announce a call for applicants for a fully funded collaborative doctoral studentship from October 2024, under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP4) scheme.This PhD will be the first to research the relationship between the home darkroom and LGBTQ+ people’s quest for freedom of expression and visual representation in Britain from the 1950s to the present. The project will combine the archival study of LGBTQ+ photographic practices at home with two complementary collecting projects: oral history interviews with LGBTQ+ darkroom users and photographs of and produced in home darkrooms. By working with contemporary practitioners, the student will also rethink how to share such hidden stories with museum audiences.
This project will be jointly supervised:
at the University of Westminster by Dr Sara Dominici (Senior Lecturer in Photographic History and Visual Culture), Professor Pippa Catterrall (Professor of History and Policy), and Dr Alison Hesse (Lecturer in Museum and Gallery Studies)
at the Museum of the Home by Marina Maniadaki (Exhibitions and Project Manager) and Louis Platman (Curator)
The student will be expected to spend time at both the University of Westminster and the Museum of the Home, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK. The student will have access to the same levels of training, support, and expertise as members of staff at the Museum of the Home, thus developing core museum skills alongside academic capabilities.
Project overview
This practice-based PhD adopts an interdisciplinary approach to researching, collecting, and engaging museum audiences in the untold story of the relationship between the home darkroom and LGBTQ+ people’s quest for freedom of expression and visual representation in Britain from the 1950s to the present. First, the project will investigate how the home darkroom has shaped LGBTQ+ people’s experiences of their domestic environment and, relatedly, of their own photographic practice, and influenced the history of LGBTQ+ visual culture more widely. Second, in consultation with contemporary practitioners it will conduct and collect oral history interviews, and research and collect photographs of and produced in home darkrooms, to rethink museological approaches to interpreting such largely hidden stories of making and identity.
Despite the expansion of commercial processing labs from the 1950s, rigging up a darkroom in the home thrived as a hobby because it offered creative control over and a cheaper way of producing photographs. Following the rise of digital photography and the almost entire closure of commercial labs from the 2000s, the home darkroom has supported a resurgence of interest in film photography. For LGBTQ+ people, however, developing and printing at home also allowed visual records to be created privately. This has historically been crucial because of the risk of embarrassment (or worse) if certain images were sent to commercial processors, which persisted even after partial decriminalisation in 1967. And yet, while the role played by Polaroids (which similarly removed the need for commercial labs) in LGBTQ+ people’s lives is well known, their experiences of the home darkroom is largely unexplored.
Uniting the emerging field of darkroom research with studies of the home, this PhD will unearth and collect stories of personal and collective identity through the close analysis of a domestic, creative practice. Viewing the home darkroom as a vehicle for human agency and creativity in the LGTBQ+ fight for acceptance and representation, the home can be seen as shaped by the politics of inclusion, exclusion, and inequalities. The darkroom is not a neutral container for photographic production, rather, it is a generative space that has an important influence on those who operate within it. The as-yet-unexplored intersections of home and darkroom will thus provide new insights on how LGBTQ+ people explored and expressed their world through image-making, and, in the process, created their own ideas of home and photographic practice.
The core research aims are:
To explore, for the first time, the fundamental role played by the domestic environment in fostering a material and imaginative space within which photographic representation of LGBTQ+ life in Britain could be created.
To research and collect: i) LGBTQ+ people’s memories and lived experiences of the home darkroom in Britan from the 1950s to the present, and ii) photographs of and that were produced in this space, in order to understand how the home darkroom has shaped LGBTQ+ histories and perspectives.
To diversify the understanding of home, and, consequently, the experience of the museum, by developing a new museological approach to sharing LGBTQ+ stories of image-making at home.
While the student who undertakes the work will be encouraged to choose their own focus, they will be expected to appraise the relationship between home darkroom practices and LGBTQ+ lives in relation to these three complementary aims. The research questions will be developed in consultation with the student, but may include the following:
How has the home darkroom shaped LGBTQ+ people’s experiences and understandings of their domestic environment?
What creative, social, and political agency has developing and printing photographs in the home afforded or constrained?
How can such hidden histories of making in the home be collected, evaluated, and brought to wider audiences?
Methods and sources
This PhD will combine research into photographic literature with oral histories and museum collecting strategies, and consult with contemporary practitioners. Specifically:
The study of the textual and visual materials, including grey literature (eg Hall-Carpenter Archives at the LSE Library, LGBTQ+ Archives at Bishopsgate Institute), that have supported photographers in practicing photography at home
The PhD candidate will consult the British Library’s LGBTQ+ Oral History archives and the Museum of the Home Documenting Homes collection to learn about how LGBTQ+ experiences have changed over time, and then conduct oral history interviews with LGBTQ+ people who have used/are currently using the darkroom in their home in Britain
Using focus groups, the PhD will bring into dialogue contemporary home darkroom users with historical legacies of processing photographs at home to examine the role and significance that the home darkroom plays in people’s everyday lives today
All prospective students are strongly advised to first make informal contact with the lead supervisor. Dr Sara Dominici (s.dominici1@westminster.ac.uk).The deadline for applications is 5pm (BST) on Friday 17th May 2024Interviews will be held on Wednesday 5th June 2024Full details here: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/research-degrees/studentships/ahrc-collaborative-doctoral-partnership-cdp-studentship-the-home-darkroom-and-the-freedom-of-photographic-production-in-britain-1950s-present
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