Photographic Heritage in Contemporary Britain: Reinterpreting the Dixon-Scott Collection
This PhD addresses a critical skills gap by using the Dixon-Scott Collection to develop an innovative approach to activating photographic heritage.
The National Archives holds vast but largely underused photographic collections documenting Britain’s social and cultural past. These images provide unique means to connect today's audiences with local histories, but the scale of such collections and the limited expertise in working with them can limit their potential.
This PhD addresses a critical skills gap by using the Dixon-Scott Collection (catalogue references: DSC and INF 9) to develop an innovative approach to activating photographic heritage in the present.
The Dixon-Scott Collection comprises around 16,500 photographs of locations across the UK – mainly buildings and rural scenes – taken by the commercial photographer James Dixon-Scott during the inter-war period. The photographs have been fully catalogued and over 14,000 of them have been digitised and georeferenced and are available for download through Discovery.
The doctoral researcher will use this material to develop an innovative, mixed methodology approach utilising archival research, cross-collections mapping and participatory research methods to reinterpret photographic collections. They will do this by bringing the Dixon-Scott Collection into dialogue with knowledge held within local communities and archives.
For more information about this project, please get in touch with The National Archives’ project team: Giorgia Tolfo and Katherine Howells.