Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and the National Portrait Gallery have announced the availability of a fully funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship from October 2024 through the REACH consortium under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme.
Harry Diamond: Visualising Migrant London, is a project that raises the archive of the self-taught Jewish photographer as articulating diversity, migrant presence, and urban change in post-war London. In providing a framework for future access to the Diamond archive, and by examining and interpreting an under-researched part of the NPG’s Collection, the project provides engagement with London’s multi-cultural communities from an institution based at its heart.
The aims are to:
- Situate people’s shifting sense of place, origins and identity in Diamond’s photographs.
- Trace Diamond’s networks as a Jewish photographer living and working in London’s East End.
- Locate Diamond within London’s visual history.
The objectives are to:
- Document living memory of Diamond and the individuals, groups and communities he portrayed.
- Engage with communities, cultural organisations, local studies archives and libraries, preservation societies, and artist groups to raise Soho and Whitechapel as loci for Diamond.
- Contextualise Diamond’s work in relation to post-war cultures of documentary photography and film representing the two London districts.
Key research questions
The student will be encouraged to pursue their own original enquiries, situating the project within the following principal research questions:
- Who and where did Diamond photograph?
- What do his photographs made in Soho and Whitechapel articulate about their communities?
- What do Diamond’s photographs articulate about diversity, migrant presence, and urban change in post-war London, and how might these terms be defined?
- How do Diamond’s photographs inform perceptions of London’s population in the 1970s and 1980s, and how might the work be situated in relation to existing literature on London as a migrant city?
This project will be jointly supervised by Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, Val Williams, Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at London College of Communication, Clare Freestone, Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery and Dr Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. The student will be expected to spend time at both CSM and the NPG, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK. The studentship can be studied either full or part-time.
Details and applications here: https://www.npg.org.uk/about/jobs/current-vacancies/ahrc-2024-studentship
Images: (top) Lucian Freud with his children Rose and Alexander Boyt by Harry Diamond, gelatin silver print, 1974. NPG x210024; (right) Unidentified boy, Whitechapel, London, by Harry Diamond, gelatin silver print, late 1970s. NPG x210305; (left) Harry Diamond, Brick Lane, self-portrait, gelatin silver print, 1973. NPG x199373
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