CAREERS

Creating the Artefact: Photography, Partnership and Identity at Charleston

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award

The Charleston Trust and the Art History Department, University of Sussex

One Studentship

Collaborative Doctoral Awards Scheme

The collaborative doctoral awards scheme of the Arts & Humanities Research Council aims to promote partnerships and research collaboration between universities and non-academic institutions. Collaborative research studentships provide opportunities for PhD students to gain first hand experience of work outside an academic environment. The support provided by both an academic and non-academic supervisor enhances the employment-related skills and training a research student gains during the course of their award.

The collaborative award can be held on either a full-time or part-time basis. Full time award holders will be funded for a maximum period of 3 years and need to submit their thesis within 4 years of the start of the award. Part time award holders will be funded for a maximum period of 5 years and need to submit within 7 years. Applicants must meet the same residency and academic eligibility criteria and are subject to the same regulations, terms and conditions as any standard research student funded by the AHRC. Standard tuition fees and maintenance are paid by the AHRC and an additional allowance of £500 per annum is provided to each full time student. Please note that part time students will receive a maintenance grant up to a maximum of 60% of a full-time award; students from the European Union are eligible for the award but receive only tuition fee payments from the AHRC, not maintenance grant payments.

Details of the application and selection process are set out below. The project has been conceived to outline research potential and to highlight the specific materials, both visual and archival, held at Charleston and at Sussex that are relevant to the project. While the profile of the project has been defined by the partners, the applicants are expected to shape the specifics of the research and to formulate a thesis topic that contributes to the project and suits their individual interests and skills.

Eligibility

Applicants should hold, or expect to obtain, a masters degree in a subject relevant to the project. They should also meet the AHRC residency criteria. Details of the residency criteria can be found here (word document).

 

Project Outline

Aims and Objectives

The project focuses on Charleston, the home of the Bloomsbury Group from 1916, when the artist Vanessa Bell took over the lease of the house, until the 1970s. It continues and enlarges the partnership between The Charleston Trust and the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex. The original collaborative project, which formalized a long-standing partnership between the House and University, focussed on literary and cultural understandings of the spaces and particular types of objects in the house. This project turns attention from the house itself to issues of the visual definition of cultural identity through both the investigation of the use and meaning of photography at Charleston. Drawing on the extensive archives concerning the Bloomsbury group at Charleston, the Tate Gallery and the University of Sussex, the project will consider the significance, function, and currency of photography within the artistic and domestic culture at Charleston. The project will

Intellectual issues

Charleston has been the subject of a number of art historical studies. Most notably it was included in Christopher Reed’s Bloomsbury Rooms (Yale 2004), which considers interiors designed by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry and argues for their status as experiments in an alternative approach to modernism, founded on Bloomsbury values. Other authors, particularly Frances Spalding, have focussed attention on Bell and Grant individually; Lisa Tickner has briefly explored the partnership between the two artists (Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle De Courtivron, eds., 1993). The relationship between photography, autobiography, and issues of identity has been outlined in Timothy Dow Adams’ Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Maggie Humm’s Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2002) and her more recent Snapshots of Bloomsbury (Tate, 2006) discuss the marginalized nature of amateur photography, it’s significance for feminist investigations into modernism and its relevance to the work of Woolf and Bell. Dow Adams’ survey and Humm’s concise case studies, however, do not address the art historical significance of Bell and Grant’s approach to the photograph. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Bloomsbury circle explored photography to document and define its own identity as a group of radical artists and thinkers.

As painters and designers, Bell and Grant particularly used photographs as reference sources and preparatory material for their work. They compiled folios of commercially produced photographs of old master and more recent works of art and kept them in the studio at Charleston (now in store). They also photographed their friends and family, posed in the nude or draped to suggest period costume, specifically as preparatory studies for their paintings. In addition, they made photographic records of their decorative schemes, which are often the only means of studying that work today. Both Bell and Woolf created informal snapshots of their Bloomsbury circle of friends. In Bell’s photographs, however, there is often a deliberate positioning of one figure in relation to another, suggesting a constructed representation and a calculated interest in the artistic and documentary value of the photographic image.

Defining identities: Bloomsbury Photograph.

This studentship will focus on Charleston’s collection of photographs which, during the lifetimes of Bell and Grant, included the ten albums of photographs by Vanessa Bell which are now in the Tate Archive. This phase of the partnership will evaluate the fusion of art historical, photographic and cultural influences on Vanessa Bell’s work as a photographer. We anticipate it will investigate the function and importance of photographs as reference material and documentary records in the work of Bell and Grant and, by extension, in the work of other painters of their generation. It will examine the circulation and publication of Bloomsbury photographs during the group’s most influential period and subsequently, and it will chart the evolution of an iconic set of images which effectively define the circle. Part of the work of this student will be to catalogue an important collection of early, unpublished photographs which belonged to Vanessa Bell’s family and were donated to the Charleston Trust in 2006, including the work of Julia Margaret Cameron. The project makes possible, through this and the collection of later photographs, a close examination of the relationship between photograph and memory. This project will allow the collection of photographs which Bell and Grant retained in albums and envelopes at Charleston to be situated within the visual culture of modernism and examine selected photographs as signifiers of a collective, progressive identity. The student will examine the proposition that Bloomsbury identified itself as a group, in part, through the use of photography.

Working methods

The student will begin by working with the Charleston collections to establish a corpus of materials, both archival and visual, for focused research. Bibliographical research will be undertaken on both primary Bloomsbury texts and on secondary and theoretical material. The study will involve the formal analysis of photographs and of the works of art created by Bell and Grant. The consideration of methods of creativity and the conceptualisation of works of art will be important, as are the exploration of issues of individual and group identity, in regard both to large groups (Bloomsbury) and to more intimate collaborations (the Bell/Grant partnership).

At Charleston, the student will follow the model established by the first two students. He/she will attend curatorial meetings and give informal updates as well as more formal papers on the research to the curatorial staff. The staff at Charleston is small and the student will have ample opportunity to participate in the life of the institution. By the same token, the project will provide considerable support to Charleston’s research culture.

In addition, the work of the project will involve meetings once a term between the supervisory partners at both institutions, as well as the Director of the Graduate Centre for Research and the Director of the Office for Research Support in the Humanities at Sussex to review the progress of the project.

Timescale

In year one the student will spend two days per week working at Charleston to establish the objects of study through detailed on-site work; two days in related archives and libraries, including the Tate and the Mass-Observation archives, to acquire conceptual and contextual knowledge and to review the existing literature; one day on consolidation. During the year the student will produce a Research Plan and a Research Paper, an initial, formal piece of writing on the dissertation. In year two, two days will be spent at Charleston to develop the analysis and interpretation of the on-site material; one to two days in archives and libraries, one to two days drafting substantial sections of the theses. In year three, most of the time will be spent at Sussex, consolidating the results of their research and completing the writing.

Dissemination

In addition to the thesis and publications arising from the doctoral work, the outcomes of the doctoral project will include new material to inform the internet presentation of Charleston, developed in relation to the first CDAs. The research will also contribute to interpretation in the form of guided tours, and research presentations at the Charleston Summer School in 2011.

Application Process

Please submit

NB: If you have already begun doctoral work, please refer to the research you have undertaken to date.

All documentation should be addressed to: Margaret Reynolds, Collaborative Doctoral Awards, Arts B, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH.

Email: m.reynolds@sussex.ac.uk.

Deadline

The deadline for receipt of applications is 1 October 2008.

Selection Process

Interviews will be held in October 2008.