The Truth - Deal with It

Back when I was working for Reuters they came up with a great tag line for their news service - "The Truth - Deal with It" linking the idea of Reuters as an impartial news source and its ability to deliver that news quickly to trading desktops thus offering advantages to traders making decisions about whether to buy or sell. The difficult question, especially in our "post truth" world is how can we be objective and in the rather different field of my PhD research I have been promoted to think about the John Laing archive in terms of how objective is the story that it tells of the company and its accomplishments and whether the process of managing the archive itself alters the meaning. Rebecca Peabody's article What Is the Future of the Photo Archive? started this line of thinking and led onto looking at the Photo Archives series of symposia and in particular Photo Archives V: The Paradigm of Objectivity.

I probably need to start to think more about the process by which the archive has been created and the changes that have been made to it as it has developed and been passed from John Laing to Historic England (and are there any intermediate stops).

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The Mystery L

Clapham Wind Tunnel One area where being able to talk to the people who worked for John Laing is really helpful is unravelling the odd mystery. I have noticed that in a number of photographs from the 1950s there is one or two individuals who had a large L on their jacket. I speculated on what this might be and thought that most likely it was to designate the leader of a team of workers. I was able to put a short piece in John Laing's Retired Employees' News asking for any information on the mystery L and several people kindly wrote to explain the mystery - which was no real mystery at all. The L simply stood for Laing but only new employees would be given a jacket with the logotype and so this took a long time to permeate through the organisation. A case of applying Occam's razor and not overthinking things for me.

PHRC 2019

The PHRC conference at De Montfort was tremendous and provided a lot of insights for me to go away and think about. In particular there was a lot of discussion about what is missing from an archive and what that tells us - sometimes as much as the extant material. Things for me to think about include: How colour photography creates a new sensory experience - maybe tying this into the work that Lynda Nead has done Who are the keepers of corporate memory - the business or the people who work in it? How posed are the images - are they pictures of work in progress or staged Do the images sanction and "testify" to a particular (curated?) history I was also pointed at other work that I need to read - the pile keeps getting higher!

PhD Introductions

So 2 months into the degree it is time to talk about my research ideas to a wider audience. On 4th Dec the School will be running a session titled PhD Introductions. The purpose of the event is to introduce the students' previous work and research interests, to discuss their current research ideas, developments and experiments and to generate a lively discussion about research in architecture. I get to do a 10 minute presentation followed by comments/questions/discussion. It has been a useful exercise so far - thinking about how to condense a somewhat sprawling thought process into a short piece and to make sure that it is accessible in the sense of providing enough of the background and context to allow the audience to make some sense of everything.

The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

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