Jane McArthur completed her cultural studies PhD thesis, “Forgotten Images Still Resisting Time: Writing the London Bomb Damage Photograph Archive 1940 –1945” in 2023.
Funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award with the University of Edinburgh and Imperial War Museums, Jane’s research centred on an uncatalogued archive of mostly unpublished censored press photographs which reveal the realities for civilians experiencing aerial warfare in London.
The research expanded beyond the archive to other archives and to recording life story interviews with survivors of the bombing, working with period maps and investigating the remaining traces of bomb damage in the streets surrounding IWM’s photograph archive which was at the time still housed in London.
Jane’s work takes a particular theoretical image-led approach to reading and writing with images which challenges notions of images as representative, complete or iconic to instead correlate their temporal, fragmentary nature with the disintegrating experiences of war.