EMP Work

Inspired by Golden’s photography exhibition ‘Home’, I’ve been researching the 1970’s as a decade. Apart from the early glam rock and punk, there were many things I didn’t know about the 70’s.

Perhaps it’s because it is between the hippy-era 60’s and Thatcher’s 80’s, but the economic and social factors of the 70’s that still affect our present are things that I would have previously applied to the earlier or later decade. 

The IRA Bombings of two Birmingham pubs

The ‘Three-Day Week’

The countless strikes of miners, tv broadcasters, bakers, waste disposal, post offices, lorry drivers and even grave diggers (some official with the trade unions and some not)

Rolling blackouts, rubbish over the streets, queues for bread and milk, rationed water and even some hospitals and schools had to close sporadically

The decimalisation of UK money

The ‘Winter of Discontent’

I’ve been researching into the theory of history studies and am interested in creating a metanarrative which is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining smaller stories that make the story a whole, and the study of cultural history which is;

‘the study of a particular historical period in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the economic basis underpinning society, and the social institutions of its daily life as well’

For my EMP I want to study further into memory and to document people’s lives in that period of time using local narrative, photographs, interviews, questionnaires and objects.