The bigger picture | Picture Post: A Twentieth Century Icon

This exhibition is dedicated to the groundbreaking photojournalistic magazine Picture Post, which was published from 1938 to 1957.

I approached the show with excitement and left it enriched and reflective. In short, I’d had an education.

You know the magazine – black and white photography and a snappy red masthead. Yet the only image I could muster in advance to have appeared in Picture Post was one by photojournalist Bert Hardy (1913-95) of two white women in frocks on Blackpool Promenade, published in 1951.

Although it delivers on a vintage middle class British aesthetic, this exhibition is about more than nostalgia. Leisure activities and celebrities were included in Picture Post and appear in the exhibition, but the magazine was far from parochial, being international in scope.

Like its overseas counterparts such as Paris Match in France and Life in the US, Picture Post owed its existence to the largely left-wing Jewish photographic innovators escaping Germany in the 1930s.

Co-curator Tom Allbeson, who is available for guided tours of the exhibition on request, one of which I went on, explained that the photographers were European émigrés steeped in avant-garde radical politics, and that Picture Post was founded by Stefan Lorant from Hungary, who fled Germany having been imprisoned by Nazis.

Coinciding with developments in 35mm camera technology, these pioneers developed photojournalism – writing essays with photographs. Reporting on Britain at home and abroad at a time of radical change, Picture Post both documented and influenced its readers.

The magazine ran stories about the second world war, postwar reconstruction, conflicts in Korea, Vietnam and Cyprus, and the disintegrating British empire. It explored racism, multiculturalism, poverty and gender roles, and reflected working-class lives.

Allbeson’s co-curator is Bronwen Colquhoun (see below), senior curator of photography at Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd – National Museum Cardiff.

Three-dozen stories about Welsh issues and places were published in the magazine, and Wales is well represented in the exhibition, demonstrating that what Picture Post did brilliantly, was use local stories to illustrate wider social issues.

Focus | Curating the exhibition

There are about 120 photographs on display, as well as archival material in display cases, in this show.

The Picture Post collection at Hulton Archive has about four million images, so with such a wealth of material the challenge was selecting what to include.

Luckily, we were familiar with some of it and in the early stages of the exhibition we identified three key themes that would frame the selection process, and which now form the main sections of the exhibition. These are Conflict and Empire, Society and Politics and Culture and Leisure.

As well as having a good range of subject matter, we also wanted to ensure that we represented a range of photographers – from leading Picture Post staff photographers such as Bert Hardy, to commissioned freelance photographers such as Lee Miller.

In addition, we have also included photographs that were unpublished. In many cases, and most often due to limitations of space, we have selected one photograph to represent a story – Picture Post often printed several – so we needed to make sure that the image we selected did the job of representing the story as fully as possible.

The exhibition also displays archival material from the Tom Hopkinson Archive and Bert Hardy Archive at Cardiff University, as well as the Hulton Archive.

Much of this material delves deeper into the production of the magazine, from decisions around layouts to the processes that went into putting the magazine together, embracing the editorial team, reprographics, printers and binders.

Bronwen Colquhoun is curator of prints and drawings at National Museum Cardiff

Butetown (which along with Cardiff Docks formed part of the area known as Tiger Bay, Wales’s first multicultural community), appeared in a 1952 issue with photos by Hardy.

Allbeson, a reader at the School of Culture, Media and Journalism in Cardiff, invited Butetown residents to select photographs for the exhibition. Delightfully, the accompanying film of this process features a woman called Gaynor Legall, who is seen dancing in one of the photographs.

Documenting a Welsh multicultural community well represented among exhibition visitors, these images serve to make negativity about migrants from contemporary far-right commentators particularly abhorrent.

A sacrificed village

The Welsh story I perhaps found most stirring is “The valley that waits for drowning or reprieve”, which was published in the magazine in 1957, eight years before the village of Capel Celyn was flooded to become a reservoir.

“Liverpool’s plans would end his” reads the text accompanying Alex Dellow’s photographs of Cadwalader Jones who “has bred a pedigree dairy herd, improved land, remodelled his house [and] built a new shed and barn”.

As an English immigrant to Wales very aware of the political and emotional legacy of the valley flooded to provide Liverpool with water, I am comforted to find that the London-based magazine took a concerned interest.

Ephemera including Hardy’s Leica camera and daybooks, negatives and contact sheets offer an insight into how skills such as splicing photographs were undertaken manually in a pre-digital world.

One of the challenges for the curators was how to represent the magazine in a gallery setting. Whereas a magazine is something to be thumbed in private by the reader, framed photographs on public view become art that is not to be touched.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to display “unused” images. While the magazine’s editors chose images that worked on the page, the curators selected photographs that stood alone.

Images not words

With the concise introductory text panels providing just the right amount of context, the curation follows an effective “show don’t tell” approach.

The role of women, for example, does not have its own section or commentary, but is a powerful sub-theme throughout, ranging from the photo-story “Should Women Wear Trousers” from 1941, to “Teenage civilian girls are instructed in handling a rifle by an Egyptian soldier” in a Bert Hardy image from 1956.

Particularly startling is how these 20th-century images highlight and give context to contemporary events. “A meeting of the British Union of Fascists, at Earl’s Court, London,” by Humphrey Spender in 1939, looks very much like a Nazi Nuremburg rally, until closer inspection reveals the Union Jack above the huge audience.

It’s a chilling image given subsequent events, and the current popularity of Reform UK. This exhibition is one that everyone can learn from.

Post exhibition, other images fill my mind. One photograph in the “Beginnings” section (“Title unknown”, taken circa 1935 by Austrian émigré Edith Tudor-Hart, 1908-1973) piqued my curiosity.

It shows Rhondda Valley women on the street with umbrellas and placards. A little digging revealed the women were protesting against unemployment and poor living conditions, and that Tudor-Hart was later exposed as a Russian spy.

In the Picture Post era, both female roles and the political environment had complexity and depth that resonate today.

Far from being something I saw, enjoyed and forgot, this exhibition has stayed with me long after my visit, inspiring further research and contemplation.

Julie Brominicks, the author of The Edge of Cymru, studied fine art and art history at Aberystwyth University and writes for Nation Cymru