Engendering the Slum: Photography in East London in the 1930s

Photographs are not truthful records of reality. They are images that are always interpreted, and this essay looks at some critical interpretations of photographs taken in the 1930s of white working-class women in the streets of East London. It pays particular attention to two current critiques that tend to address two different kinds of photographs (and in so doing to constitute them as distinct genres): a Foucauldian account of photography as a form of disciplining surveillance, and a Lacanianinfluenced analysis of photography as a disruptive reminder of absence and death. By examining documentary photographs and family snapshots from the East End in the 1930s I argue, first, that both of these critical accounts require an explicit consideration of the constitution of sexual difference, since both implicitly reproduce regressive visions of (working-class) femininities. Secondly, I argue that feminist revisions of both should be deployed together in order to effect a destabilising critique of the constitution of sexual difference through photographs. I elaborate that argument by considering a third series of photographs, commissioned by Stepney Borough Council in 1937 to record housing condemned as slums in the borough. In discussing that series, I suggest that through its organisation of the spatiality and corporeality of the women photographed outside their houses that were to be demolished, a radically uncertain femininity is conjured.