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Soldiers and Suffragettes: The Photography of Christina Broom , Anna Sparham, with contributions by Margaret Denny, Diane Atkinson and Hilary Roberts. Museum of London and Philip Wilson Publishers, London and New York, 2015. 240 pages, with more than 250 black & white illustrations. Softcover £20.00, ISBN 978-1-781-30038-1

2016; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03087298.2015.1131411

2150-7295

Jennifer Green‐Lewis,

Photography and Visual Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Philip Larkin was not on my mind when I entered last summer’s exhibition of Christina Broom’s photography at the Museum of London Docklands, but it was hard to keep his poem ‘MCMXIV’ at bay; indeed, several of the photographs featured in the exhibition seemed like the very source of it. Larkin describes a photograph of men in the summer of 1914, queuing to enlist, and the words with which he evokes the pre-war world – ‘The crowns of hats, the sun/on moustached archaic faces/Grinning as if it were all/An August Bank Holiday lark’ – provided me with a depressing inner soundtrack to Broom’s group photographs of young men: Cambridge undergraduates on the water at Putney, readying for the boat race; soldiers lounging with pipes and cigarettes in the army barracks at Chelsea; more soldiers on duty, in clean uniforms, demonstrating new machine guns in Hyde Park, or checking equipment on Wimbledon Common – all photographs taken by Broom in the summer of 1914. ‘Never such innocence’, as the poem goes, ‘Never before or since’.Contrary to what one might suppose, much of the poignancy of Christina Broom’s wartime photographs comes not from nostalgia, which presumably would have us wishing for those days, but rather from discomfort, the sensation of imbalance peculiar to looking at old photographs. We know what comes next in these soldiers’ story, and they do not. In these photographs, the horror is implicit; with a very few later exceptions, they show only healthy and whole men. Nonetheless, the burden of hindsight threatens to overwhelm the exhibition, which has plenty of other material that deserves attention.Mrs Albert Broom, as she called herself professionally, took up photography at the age of forty in 1903 after realising the commercial potential of postcards during time spent running a stationery shop in London. It was a decision driven by financial need, since her husband had been injured in a cricket accident and could no longer work. As Amy Levy’s novel The Romance of a Shop suggested in 1888, photography was by then a viable career option for a woman. Unlike Levy’s heroines, however, Broom never had a studio, and instead took all her photographs outdoors. The developing, printing and manufacture of the postcards were all done in the coal cellar at home with the assistance of her daughter, Winnie.Beyond the fact that Winnie worked alongside her mother for more than thirty years, and served at some point as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse during the war, neither book nor show tells us much about her. Information about how Christina Broom learned her craft is also limited. Unlike those female photographers of the period who produced society portraits, she had no social network on which to draw, a fact that resulted in a more varied and consequently more interesting body of work which reflects the everyday life of London and its inhabitants. While royalty features in a number of Broom’s photographs, it does so chiefly in the context of spectacle and public entertainment. Nonetheless, there are a few remarkable close-ups, such as a moody young Prince of Wales in the Grenadier Guards at Wellington Barracks in 1914 (is he nervous? Self-conscious? Angry?); and indeed one could argue that the staying power of Broom’s photographs stems from the contrast of such unexpected intimacies with the historic and social scope of the work as a whole.There are few clues available to Christina Broom’s politics, although her magnificent photographs of suffragettes, particularly those from Women’s Sunday in June 1908, invite speculation. Certainly, it is tempting to think of the woman behind the camera as sympathetic to the aims of those she photographed, although there is no evidence for it, beyond the fact that, in a striking number of the images, Broom is clearly seen by her subjects, acknowledged with a smile or a direct glance. Indeed, looking at these strikingly informal images of excited, cheerful, reflective and purposeful women, the viewer is struck time and again by the eye contact that suggests Broom did more than merely focus her camera. There must have been some banter, perhaps, some friendly, even funny exchange. Young, middle-aged, old, in buttoned gloves and large hats, with the occasional mortarboard among them, whether in arranged groups or marching, a good number of these women gaze directly at us – or rather, they gaze at Broom, the woman recording them. The photographs show history performed, enacted by ordinary citizens, but they also show photography as conversation, something reciprocal and consensual. They show pageant and parade, politics embodied.Given the force of the photographs, then, it comes as a surprise to learn that this exhibition, like the book, is the first ever dedicated to Christina Broom’s work. Both raise the question of why that work is not more widely known, although the answer probably has to do with Broom’s commercial associations and the critical failure to recognise picture postcards in terms of aesthetic accomplishment – reasons of class and type, that is, rather than gender.Broom’s work was certainly well-circulated during the twenty-five years she sold her postcards from her small stand in the Royal Mews. In the early years of the twentieth century the market for picture postcards was thriving, stoked by cheaper postage and a guaranteed mail delivery that occurred up to seven times a day. Between sales and production, the Brooms had a long workweek serving their many customers; moreover, in their early twentieth-century world, photographs were unequivocally made, not taken. In the exhibition, Winnie’s labour in the cellar with chemicals, like her diminutive mother’s navigations through London crowds with heavy equipment, is more than theoretical context: we get a chance to see what the whole business really entailed. An excellent short movie about the darkroom provides a necessary antidote to the idea that photographs just happen, by detailing the work necessary to develop prints from plate glass negatives, a process undertaken for forty of the images on exhibition.And then there was all of the bookkeeping. As a successful businesswoman, Broom was diligent with her records, and her notebooks, also on display, record sitters, accounts, dates and contact information, as well as documenting the quick turn-around that ambitiously guaranteed her customers same-day service. Albums of newspaper clippings, including reproductions of her work sold to the press or featured (sometimes unattributed) in magazines and other publications, suggest Broom’s pride in her accomplishment and give the viewer a useful physical dimension to many years of hard work.Those years are to some extent illuminated by the four essays in the book, although more rigorous editing could have prevented occasional overlap of material and the retelling of various stories. That said, many of the stories are worth repeating, such as the one about how Christina Broom was adopted as the official photographer of the Scots Guards. Passing by one of their sporting events in Chelsea, she was asked in to watch, and, having her camera with her, she proceeded to take photographs of the soldiers. After Christina sent over the pictures (the fourteen-year-old Winnie apparently made the prints), she was invited to the Barracks in order to take pictures of the ‘Guard Mounting’ the following morning. The commanding officer clearly recognised the potential in postcards for soldiers to stay in touch with their families. Ultimately this connection led to Broom’s ‘semi-official’ appointment as photographer to the Household Brigade. The relationship lasted, according to Hilary Roberts, until Broom’s death in 1939, and her familiar presence around the Barracks no doubt contributed to the relaxed and genial expressions of the soldiers she photographed. It also accounts, of course, for the fact that what happened to so many of them during the war is recorded in handwritten notes that accompany some of the images on exhibition. These were people Broom knew.In her essay on the suffragette photographs, Diane Atkinson offers other snippets about Broom’s life, such as the fact that she was once Oscar Wilde’s mother’s landlady and served as a character reference at the famous trial (where she testified that Oscar reliably paid the rent); or that, decades earlier, Thomas Carlyle lived two doors down from the Broom family residence and had to build himself a soundproof room in his house to escape the barking of their dog. It is all part of the urban hum of London life, and, irrelevant as much of it is to the photographs, it is nonetheless just as absorbing as the random detail of Broom’s picture postcards.Some of those details, of course, are not random. The contrast between the mounted policeman and the marching women of the Prisoners’ Pageant, 23 July 1910, for example, suggests Broom’s eye for contrast and pathos: the women, all in white as they march toward the camera, include Sylvia Pankhurst and others who had been prisoners for the cause. A fabulous photograph of three grim-faced women staffing a Women’s Social and Political Union exhibition stand during the Women’s Parliament of February 1908 is full-frontal, gothic, dramatic. Indeed, the suffragists are extraordinarily compelling subjects, and, like Broom’s soldiers, an entire exhibition might have been built around them.Margaret Denny’s essay is similarly rich with detail and helpfully focuses on the market for postcards as well as Broom’s wide range of subjects. Skilled as she was at crowd scenes, Broom also took numerous photographs of battleships and monuments; hundreds, if not thousands, of urban views both tranquil and busy; and, as her notebooks show, there were also sessions involving ‘Groups, Children, Pets, Statuary, Interiors, etc.’ In terms of Broom’s ‘practice, style and production’, Denny draws an interesting parallel with the contemporaneous work of Eugène Atget, and certainly Broom’s London seems to have had more in common with Atget’s Paris than with the London of other female photographers of the time such as Alice Hughes, Kate Pragnell or Lallie Charles.Broom’s subject was society with a small ‘s’, a fact that lends democratic appeal to her photographs and powerfully informs their documentation of public life and its collision with private human circumstance. As Anna Sparham notes, Broom was ‘a pioneer for women press photographers in the UK’. Yet she did not go looking for a story, and there is no evidence that her photographs were intended to do anything other than sell well. She simply got out into London and recorded what was going on in the public thoroughfare, and it makes for fascinating viewing.