(in progress)

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Amid proliferating reanimations of historical narratives in the public sphere, flexible to the intentions of politicians, tabloid and social media actors, Britain finds itself in a complicated space. Tinted histories, myths and formations of national identity are frequently stirred in generating public upswells for policy and, more recently, reclaiming a believed inheritance of a charged “greatness” and "underlying values".

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This itself is nothing new, however.

 

In the 19th Century, a collective, constructed self-portrait emerged from a series of intervening institutional forces across the British cultural sector. It positioned the country as a once-primitive land, “civilised” by the Roman Empire, and the natural inheritors of said Empire. It looked to sanitise and sweep away the violence of its ideology whilst grounding a political re-enactment of malleable narratives which have echoed to the present. Considering both history and photography themselves as mediators of reality, Revision traces a triangular case study of colonial narratives between the Roman occupation of Britannia, British Imperialism and the country today, inviting speculation towards their resonance.