Rural Labour: Photographic Representation of the English Countryside in the 1930s Socialist Press

The popular socialist press of 1930s Britain was pioneering in its use of photographic imagery in news publication. Both the Daily Herald and Weekly Illustrated (later simply Illustrated) were established as socialist publications, owned by and overtly in support of the Labour party of the day. The photographic archive for these publications is held at the National Media Museum, Bradford (UK), and includes a section on Agriculture. Drawing on material from the archive, this paper examines photographic representations of the countryside and rural issues in these publications and interrogates their political and ideological underpinnings. Sources for a socialist imagining of the countryside are investigated and the ideological and political positions of the British Labour movement in the 1930s are considered to explain Labour conceptions of the countryside and to explore how these positions may be reflected in the photographic press directly under Labour influence or control. Changes in photographic technology and the photo-journalistic practice of the period are reviewed in the light of the archive evidence and assessed for their effect on representations of the countryside and their implications for a more general cultural and social understanding of rural experience.