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’.