Curating as critical inquiry: reframing Shirley Baker's photographs and theorising their interpretation in exhibitions

At the intersection of photographic history and theory with curatorial theory and practice, this thesis proposes a model for analysing an expanded method of exhibiting photography as a research practice. Using qualitative research methods, based on solicited public participation, the thesis examines the co-production of emergent and experiential knowledge, of how viewers understand what photographs do, and how to understand what such viewers are doing with photographs encountered in an exhibition. I focus on British photographer Shirley Baker (1932-2014) who photographed (1961-1981) in working-class districts of Manchester and Salford, and my exhibition Women, Children; and Loitering Men staged in London, 2014 and Madrid, 2016. Its adaptation for Manchester Art Gallery in 2017 is the core of this research project. I authored the first biography of the photographer, situating her as an agent within a personal and broader cultural matrix in post-war social history and photographic practices. Analysing the limitations of the sparse literature on her work, the thesis contests the generic framing of her images as historical records and/or social documentary. In Manchester, I devised preliminary and concurrent methods of soliciting and analysing public participation in order to research and theorize what viewers were doing with Baker’s photographs, and what the complex processes of meaning-making was doing for the viewers. Two innovative participatory practices photo elicitation and ‘Tea with the Curator’ conversations, generated recorded oral archives. Using Grounded Theory Method, I analysed and coded this oral material and deployed the concepts of ‘compositing’ and ‘composure’ as contributions to photographic and curatorial theory. This research project re-locates photographic exhibitions as a unique form of public research inquiry, taking place in a space of sociability and mutuality. I provide evidence that an expanded curatorial practice activates, for contemporary audiences, rich discursive, imaginative and affective opportunities, restoring to Baker’s historical photographs what John Berger described as ‘a living experience’.