{"id":878,"date":"2008-06-28T23:15:39","date_gmt":"2008-06-28T23:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/?p=878"},"modified":"2009-01-09T09:09:05","modified_gmt":"2009-01-09T09:09:05","slug":"heritage-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/06\/28\/heritage-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"HERITAGE INDUSTRY"},"content":{"rendered":"

After writing my The Turner Effect<\/a> blog entry I was reminded of John Taylor’s book A Dream of England<\/a>. In the book Taylor talks about how the tourist industry uses heritage and draws on poets and novelists to advertise places \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Shakespeare Country around Stratford-Upon-Avon (also branded England\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s England), Bronte Country in Yorkshire, Hardy Country in Wiltshire and Dorset, Catherine Cookson Country in Tynesdie and Beatrix Potter tourism in the Lake District.<\/p>\n

\"ccf18042008_00010\"<\/p>\n

In a chapter titled \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcPleasures of the Imagination\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Taylor looks at the work of photographers who have adopted a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153quizzical stance in relation to the kinds of photographs which tourists produce or which are produced for them in guidebooks.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Photographers who \u00e2\u20ac\u0153express doubts about the imagine community of England fashioned in the image of the dominant white middle class.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Taylor terms these individuals, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcoppositional photographers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, and he includes bodies of work by Martin Parr (Cost of Living<\/em>),\u00c2\u00a0 John Kippin (ENGLISHISTORY<\/em>), Karen Knorr (Monks of Disfunction<\/em>), Ingrid Pollard (Pastoral Interludes<\/em>) and Paul Reas (Flogging a Dead Horse<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\"paul-reas\"<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a9 Paul Reas<\/p>\n

In Flogging A Dead Horse<\/a>, Paul Reas<\/a> photographs the tour guide who carries a reproduction of Constable’s original Flatford Mill painting and is seen indicating the area which Constable actually painted, thereby overcoming the tourists fear of failing to see the desired spot. Reas\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 work is a biting criticism of the heritage industry, an industry which Taylor suggests \u00e2\u20ac\u0153represents a break with a politicsed and complex historical appreciation of contemporary English life.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Heavyweights such as English Heritage and National Trust use entertainment to display history, but a sanitized version which is just a representation of the past, clinical and doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t present contradictions or context.<\/p>\n

You can see more of Reas’ work from Flogging a Dead Horse (Pub: Cornerhouse\/Arts Council, UK 1993) here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After writing my The Turner Effect blog entry I was reminded of John Taylor’s book A Dream of England. In the book Taylor talks about how the tourist industry uses heritage and draws on poets and novelists to advertise places \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Shakespeare Country around Stratford-Upon-Avon (also branded England\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s England), Bronte Country in Yorkshire, Hardy Country […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[32,36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":889,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions\/889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}