Annebella Pollen
Biographic Data
| ID | 346729 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annebella Pollen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annebella |
| FAMILY NAME | Pollen |
| SIGNATURE | POLLEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Brighton |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4896-8702 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Photographic Firsts, Seen from a Distance
In 2012, Mass Observation, the British survey of everyday life, asked about first camera experiences, resulting in 175 responses from correspondents aged 19 to 93. Autobiographical accounts communicated photography-based familial hierarchies and parent-child power struggles. Photographic firsts (earliest material experiences of handling a camera and earliest photographs taken) have not previously been privileged as sites for identity formation. S…
The Pleasures of Platinum
Lynda Nead, British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain, London and New Haven, Yale University and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2025, 240 pp., 190 × 254 mm, 143 b-w and colour illustrations, ISBN: 9781913107499
‘Cameras and young people belong together’
In 1944, U. S. Camera Company, the force behind one of the largest circulation photography magazines, launched Camera Comics for children. At the heart of every ten-cent issue was Kid Click, a teenage “shutterbug” whose camera helped him overcome bullies at summer camp, to uncover Nazi spy rings, and to bring armed robbers to justice. The character provided a neat segue to the rotogravure illustrated and textual pages of Camera Comics that offere…
Visual Art in a National Frame
The opportunity to consider, afresh, what visual culture might mean, and the implications of its geographical location in/of/from/about Britain, as per the journal’s title, is a valuable exercise f
On Not Looking Jewish
For more than 25 years, artist Barbara Loftus, born 1946, has developed a substantial body of work, across figurative painting, book works and creative documentary film, rooted in her experience as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Loftus’s mother, Hildegard Basch [1917–2007], was born into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family but the securities of her comfortable life in Berlin were devastated by the catastrophic events of Nazi German…
From Art History Pedagogic Resource to Post-Digital Art Medium
Over the last decade, 35mm slide libraries that were used to support art history teaching in higher education in Europe and North America have been widely dismantled and dispersed. This article examines the cultural values that have been illuminated by debates about their decline and disposal, and the contexts and practices for their afterlife. Drawing on auto-ethnographic research, interviews with former slide librarians and surviving slide libr…
Indignities Imposed by Arbitrary Adult Rule?” Children’s Dress (and Undress) in Progressive Schools in Interwar England
Independent schools describing themselves as “progressive,” “modern,” or “advanced” flourished in interwar England. At the same time, new ideas were emerging among intellectuals about the social and psychological value (or otherwise) of clothing (and its lack). Progressives’ experiments in living and loving, eating and dressing, intersected with the choices they made for educating their children. Radical utopian child-centred establishments integ…
There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’
What is to be gained by studying visual observation in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections? What can we see of the pandemic through diarists' images and words? Visual methods were part of the plural research strategies of social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) in its first phase, when it was established in 1937, but remained marginal in relation to textual research methods. This continues with the post-1981 revival of the Mass Obs…
Emptying the Wardrobe, Clearing the House
House clearance companies frequently operate as the first brokers of goods as they move from first-hand usage to second-hand repurposing or to disposal. Especially in their end-of-life formation, house clearers process and disperse diverse ranges of unwanted goods, accumulated over lifetimes, making commercial decisions at speed about their next directions. The small-scale study of UK house clearance practice is underpinned by empirical observati…
Objects of Denigration and Desire
The study of amateur photography presents a distinctive methodological challenge to photographic studies. For too long considered as a sub-category of photography or even as a photographic genre – when not ignored entirely in canonical histories - amateur photography has nonetheless represented, for over a hundred years, the single largest area of photographic practice. Too broad to see as a whole, and notoriously slippery to categorise, a range …
Picturing the family
mostly exploring family photography, although family representations on film are also included
Imagining everyday life
Imagining everyday life: Engagements with vernacular photography." Visual Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Criminal Quilts, Gunnersbury Park Museum, London, 2–3 November 2019
Invited 1200-word review of Ruth Singer's travelling exhibition at Gunnersbury Park Museum, 2019
Tales of wonder
Tales of wonder: retelling fairy tales through picture postcards." Visual Studies, 33(4), pp. 398–399
Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures
Nudism has been largely overlooked as a means for exploring utopian ideas about bodies and dress, yet the first decade of organized nudism in England demonstrates idealistic beliefs in the powers of disrobing. Those who reject clothes think deeply about dress, and nudist practitioners in the 1920s and 1930s produced distinctive and sometimes sophisticated theories of fashion and its discontents. At this time “social nudism” was a new and minority…
Mad men, mad world
Mad Men, the AMC-produced US drama set in a 1960s New York advertising agency, has garnered widespread praise and awards over its six series to date. With complex characterisation, slow-burning plo
My Position in the Design World
Where is subjectivity located in the design curriculum? As a result of historical regulation of the place of practice and theory in British higher education, design students are routinely expected to utilize a range of different skills in the different aspects of their studies. Critics of what is sometimes described as the “academic element” of studio-based teaching and learning have complained that while art and design students are required to p…
The Valentine has fallen upon evil days’
This article examines the social control embodied and enacted in the practices of sending and receiving mocking valentine cards in the Victorian era. Particularly popular in the period 1840–80, cheaply printed and cheaply sold ‘mock’ or ‘mocking’ comic valentines were the inverse of their better-known sentimental print partners. Usually featuring a crude caricature, intended to represent the recipient, and a satirical accompanying verse, such car…
Shared Ownership and Mutual Imaginaries
The methodologies that might be best used to interpret Mass Observation's distinctive research resources have tended to be considered on a case by case basis by individual researchers and have rarely been the subject of concerted, dedicated scrutiny. During 2009-10, however, the University of Brighton research network Methodological Innovations: Using Mass Observation (MIMO) brought together 150 international academics, archivists, writers and ar…
Ordinary and Everywhere
This 1200-word commissioned review for New Formations journal considers the contribution made to the study of non-professional photographic practices by media and communications scholar, Martin Hand
“Historians in Two Hundred Years' Time Are Going to Die for That!”
The photograph's relationship to history and memory has been extensively theorized, but little empirical research has been undertaken to understand how these ideas intersect with the experience of photographs as historical forms in everyday life. This article explores the complexity of photographs' temporality and evaluates their memorial status through the prism of a distinctive body of material: the 55,000 amateur photographs taken on a single …
Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present
Despite some dismissal of the research value of its idiosyncratic materials, a substantial body of scholarly publications now uses first-phase Mass Observation papers (1937–50s). An emerging body of literature also draws upon the post-1981 papers of the Mass Observation Project. While Mass Observation’s significance as a historical source is demonstrable through its vast scale, unique holdings and acknowledged international standing, how the ecle…
Plus Ça Change
distinctive take on the study of photography, yet in From Snapshots to Social Media: The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography they set themselves a challenge.Attempting to find a "middle ground" between interaction design research, which they find "technology-centric", and the Cultural Studies-influenced Visual Culture, they aim to address perceived imbalances between these differing approaches in their survey of domestic photography by drawi…
Sweet Nothings
This article details the results of a research project searching for evidence of courtship in Brighton Museum's holdings of mainly topographical early twentieth-century postcards. Assembling a body of evidence that demonstrates Brighton as a historic location for romance and the postcard as a flirtatious form of communication, “Sweet Nothings” argues that while postcard inscriptions have been largely overlooked in academic literature, the coded a…
Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present
Despite some dismissal of the research value of its idiosyncratic materials, a substantial body of scholarly publications now uses first-phase Mass Observation papers (1937–50s). An emerging body of literature also draws upon the post-1981 papers of the Mass Observation Project. While Mass Observation’s significance as a historical source is demonstrable through its vast scale, unique holdings and acknowledged international standing, how the ecle…
Shared Ownership and Mutual Imaginaries
The methodologies that might be best used to interpret Mass Observation's distinctive research resources have tended to be considered on a case by case basis by individual researchers and have rarely been the subject of concerted, dedicated scrutiny. During 2009-10, however, the University of Brighton research network Methodological Innovations: Using Mass Observation (MIMO) brought together 150 international academics, archivists, writers and ar…
Indignities Imposed by Arbitrary Adult Rule?” Children’s Dress (and Undress) in Progressive Schools in Interwar England
Independent schools describing themselves as “progressive,” “modern,” or “advanced” flourished in interwar England. At the same time, new ideas were emerging among intellectuals about the social and psychological value (or otherwise) of clothing (and its lack). Progressives’ experiments in living and loving, eating and dressing, intersected with the choices they made for educating their children. Radical utopian child-centred establishments integ…
Imagining everyday life
Imagining everyday life: Engagements with vernacular photography." Visual Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Tales of wonder
Tales of wonder: retelling fairy tales through picture postcards." Visual Studies, 33(4), pp. 398–399
My Position in the Design World
Where is subjectivity located in the design curriculum? As a result of historical regulation of the place of practice and theory in British higher education, design students are routinely expected to utilize a range of different skills in the different aspects of their studies. Critics of what is sometimes described as the “academic element” of studio-based teaching and learning have complained that while art and design students are required to p…
Sweet Nothings
This article details the results of a research project searching for evidence of courtship in Brighton Museum's holdings of mainly topographical early twentieth-century postcards. Assembling a body of evidence that demonstrates Brighton as a historic location for romance and the postcard as a flirtatious form of communication, “Sweet Nothings” argues that while postcard inscriptions have been largely overlooked in academic literature, the coded a…
Sweet Nothings
This article details the results of a research project searching for evidence of courtship in Brighton Museum's holdings of mainly topographical early twentieth-century postcards. Assembling a body of evidence that demonstrates Brighton as a historic location for romance and the postcard as a flirtatious form of communication, “Sweet Nothings” argues that while postcard inscriptions have been largely overlooked in academic literature, the coded a…
Plus Ça Change
distinctive take on the study of photography, yet in From Snapshots to Social Media: The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography they set themselves a challenge.Attempting to find a "middle ground" between interaction design research, which they find "technology-centric", and the Cultural Studies-influenced Visual Culture, they aim to address perceived imbalances between these differing approaches in their survey of domestic photography by drawi…
Ordinary and Everywhere
This 1200-word commissioned review for New Formations journal considers the contribution made to the study of non-professional photographic practices by media and communications scholar, Martin Hand
“Historians in Two Hundred Years' Time Are Going to Die for That!”
The photograph's relationship to history and memory has been extensively theorized, but little empirical research has been undertaken to understand how these ideas intersect with the experience of photographs as historical forms in everyday life. This article explores the complexity of photographs' temporality and evaluates their memorial status through the prism of a distinctive body of material: the 55,000 amateur photographs taken on a single …
Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present
Despite some dismissal of the research value of its idiosyncratic materials, a substantial body of scholarly publications now uses first-phase Mass Observation papers (1937–50s). An emerging body of literature also draws upon the post-1981 papers of the Mass Observation Project. While Mass Observation’s significance as a historical source is demonstrable through its vast scale, unique holdings and acknowledged international standing, how the ecle…
My Position in the Design World
Where is subjectivity located in the design curriculum? As a result of historical regulation of the place of practice and theory in British higher education, design students are routinely expected to utilize a range of different skills in the different aspects of their studies. Critics of what is sometimes described as the “academic element” of studio-based teaching and learning have complained that while art and design students are required to p…
The Valentine has fallen upon evil days’
This article examines the social control embodied and enacted in the practices of sending and receiving mocking valentine cards in the Victorian era. Particularly popular in the period 1840–80, cheaply printed and cheaply sold ‘mock’ or ‘mocking’ comic valentines were the inverse of their better-known sentimental print partners. Usually featuring a crude caricature, intended to represent the recipient, and a satirical accompanying verse, such car…
Shared Ownership and Mutual Imaginaries
The methodologies that might be best used to interpret Mass Observation's distinctive research resources have tended to be considered on a case by case basis by individual researchers and have rarely been the subject of concerted, dedicated scrutiny. During 2009-10, however, the University of Brighton research network Methodological Innovations: Using Mass Observation (MIMO) brought together 150 international academics, archivists, writers and ar…
Mad men, mad world
Mad Men, the AMC-produced US drama set in a 1960s New York advertising agency, has garnered widespread praise and awards over its six series to date. With complex characterisation, slow-burning plo
Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures
Nudism has been largely overlooked as a means for exploring utopian ideas about bodies and dress, yet the first decade of organized nudism in England demonstrates idealistic beliefs in the powers of disrobing. Those who reject clothes think deeply about dress, and nudist practitioners in the 1920s and 1930s produced distinctive and sometimes sophisticated theories of fashion and its discontents. At this time “social nudism” was a new and minority…
Tales of wonder
Tales of wonder: retelling fairy tales through picture postcards." Visual Studies, 33(4), pp. 398–399
Criminal Quilts, Gunnersbury Park Museum, London, 2–3 November 2019
Invited 1200-word review of Ruth Singer's travelling exhibition at Gunnersbury Park Museum, 2019
Objects of Denigration and Desire
The study of amateur photography presents a distinctive methodological challenge to photographic studies. For too long considered as a sub-category of photography or even as a photographic genre – when not ignored entirely in canonical histories - amateur photography has nonetheless represented, for over a hundred years, the single largest area of photographic practice. Too broad to see as a whole, and notoriously slippery to categorise, a range …
Picturing the family
mostly exploring family photography, although family representations on film are also included
Imagining everyday life
Imagining everyday life: Engagements with vernacular photography." Visual Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Emptying the Wardrobe, Clearing the House
House clearance companies frequently operate as the first brokers of goods as they move from first-hand usage to second-hand repurposing or to disposal. Especially in their end-of-life formation, house clearers process and disperse diverse ranges of unwanted goods, accumulated over lifetimes, making commercial decisions at speed about their next directions. The small-scale study of UK house clearance practice is underpinned by empirical observati…
On Not Looking Jewish
For more than 25 years, artist Barbara Loftus, born 1946, has developed a substantial body of work, across figurative painting, book works and creative documentary film, rooted in her experience as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Loftus’s mother, Hildegard Basch [1917–2007], was born into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family but the securities of her comfortable life in Berlin were devastated by the catastrophic events of Nazi German…
From Art History Pedagogic Resource to Post-Digital Art Medium
Over the last decade, 35mm slide libraries that were used to support art history teaching in higher education in Europe and North America have been widely dismantled and dispersed. This article examines the cultural values that have been illuminated by debates about their decline and disposal, and the contexts and practices for their afterlife. Drawing on auto-ethnographic research, interviews with former slide librarians and surviving slide libr…
Indignities Imposed by Arbitrary Adult Rule?” Children’s Dress (and Undress) in Progressive Schools in Interwar England
Independent schools describing themselves as “progressive,” “modern,” or “advanced” flourished in interwar England. At the same time, new ideas were emerging among intellectuals about the social and psychological value (or otherwise) of clothing (and its lack). Progressives’ experiments in living and loving, eating and dressing, intersected with the choices they made for educating their children. Radical utopian child-centred establishments integ…
There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’
What is to be gained by studying visual observation in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections? What can we see of the pandemic through diarists' images and words? Visual methods were part of the plural research strategies of social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) in its first phase, when it was established in 1937, but remained marginal in relation to textual research methods. This continues with the post-1981 revival of the Mass Obs…
Visual Art in a National Frame
The opportunity to consider, afresh, what visual culture might mean, and the implications of its geographical location in/of/from/about Britain, as per the journal’s title, is a valuable exercise f
‘Cameras and young people belong together’
In 1944, U. S. Camera Company, the force behind one of the largest circulation photography magazines, launched Camera Comics for children. At the heart of every ten-cent issue was Kid Click, a teenage “shutterbug” whose camera helped him overcome bullies at summer camp, to uncover Nazi spy rings, and to bring armed robbers to justice. The character provided a neat segue to the rotogravure illustrated and textual pages of Camera Comics that offere…
Photographic Firsts, Seen from a Distance
In 2012, Mass Observation, the British survey of everyday life, asked about first camera experiences, resulting in 175 responses from correspondents aged 19 to 93. Autobiographical accounts communicated photography-based familial hierarchies and parent-child power struggles. Photographic firsts (earliest material experiences of handling a camera and earliest photographs taken) have not previously been privileged as sites for identity formation. S…
The Pleasures of Platinum
Lynda Nead, British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain, London and New Haven, Yale University and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2025, 240 pp., 190 × 254 mm, 143 b-w and colour illustrations, ISBN: 9781913107499
Art (16 works) · Sociology (14 works) · History (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Visual arts (11 works) · History (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Photography and Visual Culture (8 works) · Literature (7 works)