Télémaque, Nathaniel Trumaine Nathan; (2024) Everyday Things: Visualising Young Black Adults’ Experiences in White City. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Everyday Things is a project that visualises the experiences of a kinship group of young Black adults living in White City, Shepherds Bush, West London. The project combines two main methodologies. The first is archival research, aimed at recovering the estate’s former imperial and colonial site the Great White City Exhibition (1908), but also more recent histories of the estate. The second is a form of collaborative photographic research undertaken with the kinship group of young Black adults. Depictions of young Black adult lives are rarely seen in British academic research. Inspired by Roy DeCarava’s photographic works in post-war Harlem New York, as well as Ingrid Pollard’s 1980’s situated interventions into the British countryside, my practice-related research facilitates site-specific dialogues, focused on contemporary and archival visualisations of White City and young Black adult’s experiences of living there. This project offers up site-specific framings of White City’s origins as an imperial and colonial exhibition site, its origins as an interwar estate eponymously called the White City Estate and its current existence as the White City neighbourhood compromised of residential, educational and businesse focused services. It substantively engages with and explores scholarship and visual practitioner orientated dialogues between geography and photography whilst attending to themes of Othering and interventional archival practices. It also utilises a constellation of Black Geographies literature alongside Black feminist conceptual frameworks, pertaining to the ways of witnessing and attending to representations of White City and my kinship collective peers’ views and experiences. Through my use of photography, visual ethnography, fieldnotes and photo-elicitation interviews, this project explores my kinship collective peers’ notions of the everyday and respective everyday things through innovative visual and textual combinations reflected in this project’s photobook and postcard series.

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