Abstract
In April 2020 Historic England (HE), UK’s statutory adviser on historic environment, called out to citizens to share their lockdown experiences. Positioning the Second World War as a reference point, the call-out created a parallel in the enormity of the crisis and archiving efforts. Using the Picturing Lockdown collection as a case study, we ask: how is a historical event in-the-making memorialized and archived, and what is the relationship between past and present memory initiatives?
Combining visual and textual analysis with in-depth interviews, this research compared the HE’s official Picturing Lockdown collection, the Instagram collection via #PicturingLockdown, and the HE National Buildings Record in the Second World War. Findings demonstrate a shift in memory dynamics. First, agents of memory are no longer only political and institutional actors, but also the public at large, introducing new possibilities for publics to assume the power of collective story-telling. Second, social media presents novel ways of archiving, specifically from a representation of the past to documentation of the present. The combination of COVID-19, a worldwide crisis that transcends cultural specificities and space, set in an age of social media, wherein any individual can contribute to archiving practices, shapes and creates new ways of memorialization.
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Notes
- 1.
Historic England was first established in 1984 and until 2015 was commonly known as English Heritage. The National Buildings Record was initiated in 1941 to collect records of buildings and sites at risk during and after the Second World War.
- 2.
Culture Under Attack is an exhibition at Imperial War Museum London, curated in partnership with Historic England, exploring how war threatens not only human lives but also culture and heritage.
- 3.
This number refers to the total of #PicturingLockdown pictures posted at the time of writing this chapter. Needless to mention, this is an ‘open’ archive that continuously grows and changes.
- 4.
According to The BBC Visual and Data Journalism Team: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51768274; accessed March 28, 2022.
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Adams, T., Kopelman, S. (2024). Picturing Lockdown in the UK: Memorializing an Ongoing Crisis. In: Fridman, O., Gensburger, S. (eds) The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_3
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