my changed thoughts on people watching.

People watching is the act of observing different kind of people and their interactions, usually without their knowledge. Some people do people watching as a subconscious activity they engage in everyday life without even realizing, it is usually done when you have leisure time at outside. You do not need a conclusion while watching people subconsciously but, mostly the people-watcher comes up with assumption about the person who is been watched, depending on her/his appearance. The people-watcher portray as a narrator, he/she improvises stories in their mind.

Daniel Arnold for The New York Times
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For some people, “people watching” is a hobby which you do for amusement. In that case, it is not an unconscious behavior, people can go and sit in front of window in a café in order to do people watching but the observation does not have to make an inference. This definition of “people watching” leads me to the word “flâneur”.

On the other hand, people watching is a great way for inspiration to create fictional characters, doing a sociological research or simply to be able to understand and empathize with people who you do not give the meaning to their idiosyncratic behaviors. There I found a nine-step guide to begin people watching on https://www.wikihow.com/Begin-People-Watching 

This concept of doing “people watching” with a purpose has led me to a social research project ran from 1937 to the mid-1960s: Mass-Observation. The project’s creator Tom Harrison who aimed to create an 'anthropologhy of ourselves' had set up his base in a working-class street in the northern English industrial town of Bolton, what became known in Mass-Observation publications as the “Worktown Project”.  Also, poet Charles Madge from his London home had started to form a group of fellow-poets, artist and film-makers under the name “Mass-Observation”. It was a grand social experiment which was intent on representing the lives and opinions of ordinary working-class people across Britain. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2008/02/29/290208_bolton_worktown_feature.shtml

"They wanted to discover how ordinary people behaved. Nothing was considered too trivial to observe; everything was valued as part of a whole." Bob Snape on the aims of Mass Observation

Tom Harrisson at work on the Mass-Observation project in 1940 (Getty)

Inspired by the Mass Observation project, Craig Twyford who has a research company, began the JamJar Story Project in 2014. The project is an online digital archive of everyday life in the UK. JamJar Life Stories is a collection of memories, simple moments from daily life which ensures that the voices and stories of the important people in your world are recorded and preserved so they are never lost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMmWieGwWws

The Mass Observation project also reminded me of a work of an artist KP Brehmer. KP Brehmer started producing a series of works titled “Soul and Feeling of a Worker” in the 1970s. The series is inspired from Rexford B. Hersey’s 1932 study “Workers’ Emotions in Shop and Home”, which provides us to examining the mental states of the workers during their labor time; the aim was optimizing their productivity.

KP Brehmer, Soul and Feelings of a Worker, 1978-1980
Acrylic on canvas
Arter Collection



Comments

  1. Elif AyiterNovember 11, 2020 at 7:08 AM

    henri cartier bresson

    ReplyDelete
  2. Elif AyiterNovember 12, 2020 at 7:35 AM

    this topic needs some creative thinking when you want to research it, "the history of xxx" does not really fit here, or rather you need to xxxxx to something else.
    Street photography: https://tinyurl.com/y6hmgfrh
    Candid photography: https://tinyurl.com/y67lwacx
    And then - the history of street photography: https://tinyurl.com/yxvzhzy3
    the history of candid photography: https://tinyurl.com/y4olqecj
    Famous street photographers: https://tinyurl.com/y4l8vd38
    Famous candid photographers: https://tinyurl.com/y3fcwsl9
    And then I would start looking for articles that were written about those particular photographers. The most famous one is likely to be Henri Cartier Bresson. But there are many others too, as I can see. You will get a lot of insights from reading about what these photographers did. And then those insights can possibly be juxtaposed against the scientific studies you have above and that might achieve a really interesting contrast: How does science look at "people watching"? How does art look at "people watching"? And from that we would arrive at how YOU look at "people watching"

    ReplyDelete

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