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I intend to research, produce and present a series of visual archives using photography and sequential media. The work is to be presented for viewer engagement using a variety of methods, including means that will encourage audience participation and feedback (website, book, exhibition, presentations and seminars). This research led practice-based work will focus on industry as a broad topic and will start with the examination of a range of industrial processes, techniques, materials and equipment. I will follow on from the ‘record-based’ imagery by attempting to represent the ‘user impact’ of industrialisation; the effect it had on the people; what the process entailed, the danger; impact on social, behavioural and cultural trends. ‘As Naughton explains from his recollections of working class life ‘change in working class society was treated with suspicion and led to one becoming unpopular with ones peers’ he carries on to explain (that) ‘there is no privacy in working class life’; (Page 4 and 5).
This will require through examination and research into events, processes, tasks and activities within specific industrial working environments. It is then my intention to produce re-enactments or transcriptions based on real accounts, images or stories related to workers performing a process within an industry-based environment.
Rather than focusing on a particular process or time-period I have concluded that geographic locations should hold the pivotal underpinning for the work.
To encourage and stimulate synthesis with industrial archaeology an investigation of key elements from the development of the industrial revolution within northern England will take place beginning with the wool and cotton preparatory industries, coal, engineering and chemical manufacture.
The flying shuttle, patented by John Kay in 1733 allowed the weaver much more freedom and wider cloth at a cheaper price, as stated by Hills in ‘The Power of the Industrial Revolution’ (p22) Kay was from the Cheesden valley, a key area for the early developments of water-powered mill industries within the Rochdale, Bury and Ramsbottom area. An area of early-recorded social and cultural change. Very little remains of the mills in this valley, some walls, and part of a chimney. Like most other early industrial sites, the remains of industry tend to be scattered. Although pockets of industry where established throughout England and Britain in general, as discussed by Ashmore in his introduction to ‘the Industrial Archeology of Lancashire’ (Chapt 1). It was a culmination of key geographical, social and economic factors that caused the industrial revolution to, for the greater part take place around Lancashire. Access to evidence is to begin through exploration of museums, archives, archaeology and remaining sites of industry. The beginning of the demise of industry, alluded to by John K. Walton with ‘The post-war bubble burst disastrously in 1921, and the cotton industry was never to be the same again’ meant economic change and development, which led to the removal of vast industrial sites. Preservation and archiving of old processes offer my project a rich bases for initial development; Armley Mills for instance contains much of the original woollen and cotton preparatory, spinning and weaving machinery used for worsted production. Similar in idea to Beamish, in the North East of England by trying to; ‘promote a kind of popular, accessible “living history” that is firmly grounded in scholarship and research in the museum's own collections.’ John K Walton. Based on this notion of a reclaimed site with a visitor centre for public awareness, historical and cultural understanding. My intention would be to utilise such sites in the event that first-hand evidence is no loner available. Having visited The Museum of Science and Industry (MoSI) Manchester, Armley and The National Coal Mining Museum, Wakefield and following discussions with supervisory teams at each site with a view to the PhD proposal I have found useful strands of primary and secondary evidence with which I am confident that research can successfully and with mutual benefit be carried out.
The overarching subject was a choice based on my roots as a working class Lancastrian; born in a chemical workers terraced house and spending formative years amongst chimneys and factories with seemingly endless production lines. How this culture dominated locally, regionally and nationally in social and economic behaviour due to the reinforcement of industrialisation and mechanisation and the dominance of modernism into Western culture from the hierarchical ordering of systemic behaviour and class values. The eventual demise of this lifestyle due to free market economy and 'the greatest threat to this underlying strength of the labour movement' being 'the twin trends of declining manufacturing output and rising unemployment'. A Gamble; 1983 (p299). Where we saw the demise of mass workforce; understanding of process, the end of a time where classification was the normal way of life. Social structure today within a late post-modern society leads to much more idiosyncratic behaviour and shifting social and cultural boundaries.
The uniqueness of this project will be the content of the presented pieces, which are designed to deliver passion “What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.” Barthes 1957. A quote synonymous with the expectation of mass audience and the distancing of events through media or a kind of supposed modernist expectation of a ‘numbing-down’ of mid twentieth century Western society.
Areas of photographic investigation into industry have been carried out by a range of photographers including Michael Kenna, John Davies, Humphrey Spender, Colin Jones, Ian Macdonald and Marc Riboud to mention but a few. Of the above Davies and Kenna have similarities in their positioning of the work, all carried out in late twentieth and early twenty first century. It is clear from Kenna and Davis that they are both engaging in displaying a high level in aesthetic awareness and mastery of process and materials control but the message within the work can be ambiguous when related to cultural and sociological engagement (apart from Kenna’s work on the world war two concentration camp titled, “Impossible to Forget”). The main purpose for Kenna’s work is to fill wall space in galleries and collections. Reading commentary and critiques of Davis’ work there are overtones of social and economic consideration but from a physical distance. His work usually looks at wide views and vistas documenting our impact on the land. Bill Brandt, Humphrey Spender Colin Jones and Marc Riboud differ in not only photographic style but time period. Shot during the time of industrialisation with social and cultural activity in full view they demonstrated and recorded the real activities and in many shots individual and group engagement with industrial processes and techniques. As Spender pointed out; “The most valid and proper use of a camera is as a means of recording aspects of human behavior; as time passes, social-documentary photographs gain in interest, whereas the 'beautiful' photograph ... progressively loses interest, becomes boring." The Guardian 2005. This statements maybe extreme but it eludes to the basis for my planned transcriptions and the discovery of the ‘man-machine’; our forefathers and mothers part in the construction of our current social order. Over the past two years, I have delivered seminars based on my research into the work of Kenna, Davies, Riboud, Brandt and Spender to my undergraduate students. I have worked with both Kenna and Davies as an assistant/student and have interview both artists.

I will begin by applying my early techniques (1989-1998) in professional photography; using black and white silver-based processes with film, archival materials and presentation. "Ian Glover's landscapes give a new dimension to the areas he portrays; he studies northern towns; Glover manages to give these places a more tranquil, almost haunting atmosphere". R. Golden, 1993. "Manchester's Landscapes become a tranquil, almost melancholic landscape in Glover's work". Open Eye Gallery, 1995. I am planning a series of exhibitions in conjunction with Leeds City Council Galleries and Museums for 2009 and eventually Manchester MoSI with the aim of exhibiting work produced from post-industrial sites (Gorton, Openshaw and the Medlock Valley. ‘East Manchester wards still rank amongst the most deprived in the country’. www.neweastmanchester.com Working alongside the MoSI archive service, the work will engage with remnants of industrial sites, mainly the Locomotive foundries of Beyer and Peacock and other local heavy industrial sites. The work is an attempt to encourage the communities to re-discover their past and to encourage the development of education through visual and research-based engagement; heritage and past, presentation of research and ideas, developments in recording and analysing information.

Using, as a pretext the study of early forms of photographic composition that where themselves based on pre-Raphaelite compositions; Imogen Cunningham, who one could directly visually contextualise to Rosetti for instance (see plates 1 and 2). Sutcliffe along with Hill and Adamson, who shot more documentary, which only became possible by the invention of faster (less that 1 second) light-sensitive materials (see plates 4 and 5). So to follow the proposed documents of industrial situation I intend to re-play fragmented memories based upon researched situations and direct events by the possible application of re-enactment or re-staging. This quote from the 1842 Royal Commission on the Employment of Children and Young Persons in the Collieries in the neighbourhood of Oldham and on the State,
Condition and Treatment of such Children and Young Persons.
He had been in the habit of sending children from seven years old to nine from the workhouse to work in the coal-pits but was obliged to take them back because they were so badly used. This bad usage is general in this district. One Roger Taylor* was sent by him to Bank Moor Colliery where he stayed 12 months. There he was sadly beaten &c. After nine months he was brought
back and the doctor pronounced that he had been so badly used that he was not fit for work. [He was notwithstanding this, sent to another colliery. He is not ill-used there. He died of smallpox] the ill usage is beating them with the pick handle. Ian Winstanley 1999
These bleak accounts range from very harsh conditions through to appalling, cruel and even life-threateningly bad employers and conditions. I intend to feature my children as characters in the production of these pieces of visual narrative. I will be accompanying the pictures with extracts of dialog fro the commissions.

The above-proposed aims offer a directed sense of purpose for the work. The work will become an archive for both contemporary cultures in the form of visual interpretations of both archaeological documentations as well as fragmented reinterpretations of memory and life, as it would have been.
the Institute of Northern Studies have been an extremely useful contrast to the school of Art and Society, thus allowing shared supervision of the work. I have discussed the proposal with John Walton, one of the management colletive who seems very keen on this project. This may offer a great opportunity for further collaborative projects with like-minded researchers and theorists within the area of the history of industry and social, cultural and economic development(s).