Gander, Photo Book Workshop, 2-5pm, 31 August Join Robert Parkinson of Preston is my Paris to make your own photo book about Bolton. The workshop will include a short tour of Bolton to collect photographs which you will use to make a book about how you see the town. This event is free and suitable […]
‘The Observers are the cameras with which we are trying to photograph contemporary life’ We would like to invite photographers, writers and artists of all types to participate in a unique project inspired by Mass Observation. The Worktown Observation Centre will be open in Bolton 26 July to 2 August, in an empty shop space […]
Join a special Worktown inspired event being put on for the Manchester Histories Festival. A day long workshop based upon the Mass Observation archive of everyday working-class life in Bolton in the late nineteen-thirties. Explore the working and social lives of a Lancashire cotton town. Learn about Bolton Museum’s Humphrey Spender’s Worktown Collection and his contribution […]
Mass Observation photography exhibition featuring Worktown photography by Humphrey Spender. August 2 to 29 September 2013. Admission free
From Saturday 9th March to Sunday 25th May The theme for this year’s Humphrey Spender John Marriot Scholarship for Social Documentary Photography is ‘Sports, Spectacles and Spectators’. This scholarship is supported by Bolton Le Moors Rotary Club and the University of Bolton. Throughout the Scholarship, photographer Richard Gaskill will explore the interwoven layers of emotion […]
Anna White was the Spender Scholar in 2010-2011. She used a range of photographic techniques during the year inspired by Humphrey Spender’s photographs of life in the town. As society’s views have changed quite a lot on how acceptable it is to photograph people undercover and without consent Anna used a collaborative approach.This included setting […]
Earlier in the year we decided that looking for each of the locations in the 930 Spender photographs would be far too time consuming for just the two of us, especially as neither of us know Bolton that well, being a Mancunian and a Wiganer. So we decided it would be good to ask you […]
These photographs record a visit to Kearsley Golf Club and Manor Golf Club by current Spender scholar Richard Gaskill. The Humphrey Spender Scholarship was set up to create a contemporary response to the Worktown Archive. Richard will be documenting the theme of Sports, Spectacles and Spectators with photographs over the course of the next year culminating in […]
We finished our day of talks on Mass Observation at Bolton Museum on Saturday by heading over to Blackpool (Holidaytown) in the footsteps of the original Mass Observers. It was good fun to join relatives of original observers Julian Trevelyan, Humphrey Spender and Michael Wickham taking in the Blackpool illuminations and Saturday night mayhem. My […]
The Worktown 75th Birthday exhibition opens on Saturday 22 September at Bolton Museum, and is on until the start of December. We are particularly pleased to have the opportunity to show Humphrey Spender’s camera, which he used in Bolton. It has been kindly loaned by his widow Rachel Spender for the exhibition. The story goes that […]