everyday life

‘The potential strains of early M-O were held in creative tension by a fluid tripartite structure in which Madge was responsible for national-day surveys and directives, Harrisson responsible for the Worktown study and Jennings responsible for the presentation of results. This particular organisation was enabled by the collective decision to treat ‘images’ as the social facts of the investigation. The concept of the ‘image’ in the 1930s had a particular Modernist resonance that entailed something more specific than a mere pictorial impression. Ezra Pound had defined the Image as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ (Jones 2001:39) and the aim of the Imagist poets had been to make the image rather than the word into the unit of signification so that their poems generated their own meanings separate from dominant narrative associations...the appeal of these concepts to M-O lay in the twin ideas of variable significance and escape from externally imposed associations.’ 

Nick Hubble. 2006. Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory. Palgrave Macmillan. (6-7)