An preview to an upcoming article relating to the Maurice Richardson Collection donated to the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive in 2022.
Being handed a seemingly chaotic personal archive is enthralling and complex experience. It is laced with contradiction; offering an intimate invitation in to a person’s life, yet the individual you see remains a fragmented reflection. As an archivist, you imitate an archaeologist, identifying artefacts as belonging to one strata or another, capturing records of transactions, interactions between the subject and their environment, eventually arranging them in order to evidence their existence. The proximity of the objects to the subject, often held in their hands, created, shared and consumed by them, allows one to describe the subjects actions with great confidence but also to surmise intent and purpose. Stitching threads through material supports; weaving a tentative tapestry depicting decisions across time and space.
When the individual is deceased much is inevitably left to conjecture. Where possible one can conduct research with acquaintances, friends and/or family, allowing one to support or discount the suspicions glimpsed between the fragments. When the archive is almost entirely photographic, both the potential for profound insights and the risk of misplaced interpretations multiply exponentially. One must proceed with caution.
With the then Société Jersiaise President, Nicolette Le Quesne Westwood, I made a short trip from 7 Pier Road, through and out the back of Town, up Trinity Hill to Maurice’s home, Ville Mars. Nestled above Grand Vaux, surrounded by defensive vegetation, the property was somewhat dilapidated, but refreshingly authentic compared to the vulgar wealth so prevalent in Jersey. Maurice had lived here since 1949. Crumpled boxes containing files, albums, and folders, as well as loose photographs were gathered in the hall of the granite farmhouse. The cardboard boxes were damaged and dusty, the files and folders mouldy and infested. As I packed them into the boot and along the backseat of the Nicky’s Mini Cooper, I must admit to wondering was going to be worth the trip. Eager to find out, I began cleaning and listing that afternoon.
Maurice’s collection is shaped in a large part by his involvement with the Société. Maurice served as President and was a very active member during a tense period in the organisation’s history. Portraits of Joan Stevens, Arthur Mourant, Frank Le Maistre and other giants of the Société’s second golden period are found throughout, between images of his environment: farming, family and friends. In order to make sense of broader themes, an understanding of Maurice beyond these obvious associations is necessary. His obituary in the Société Jersiaise Annual Bulletin, describes him as, firmly conservative, both politically and economically. This statement and similar anecdotal descriptions of Maurice led me to ask the question, did his deeply conservative views shape his work as a photographer?
For Roger Scruton, champion of conservative aesthetics, beauty, a value as important as truth and goodness, has been largely rejected in 20th century, in a desperate pursuit of originality above all else. Ferenc Hörcher in his Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy, demonstrates that Scruton’s position was not simply a matter of how things look, but one of fundamental importance to the development of society and morality. For Scruton art and politics were intimately linked, with the former capable of forming ideological positions of the later.
Shawn Phillip Cooper builds on this with an action plan. In On Advancing a Conservative Aesthetics he presents ‘four principles of action’ for forming a ‘conservative cultural worldview’. These are to preserve traditional culture, to understand formal properties of ‘supreme’ cultural achievements, to create new work in conversation with this high cultural tradition and to advocate for the promotion of this tradition, in pursuit of the ‘True, the Good, and the Beautiful’. In order to ‘encourage the formation of a conservative cultural worldview’. Furthermore, for Cooper, if conservative aesthetics is to be successful must be advanced in the world in which ‘ordinary people participate’.
The up coming article will examine the Maurice Richardson Collection in this light. Did the vast visual output of this deeply conservative man align with the visual language and philosophy of Roger Scruton? What was his purpose in producing photographs? Is Cooper’s need to get beyond the ‘concert hall, museum and church’ and engage well produced ‘popular entertainments’ evident in Maurice’s work?
There are without doubt many elements of correlation between conservative aesthetics and Maurice’s work, though there are some notable deviations. For example, the everyday is often rejected by conservative aesthetics in favour of the idealised and sublime. However, the everyday is celebrated throughout Maurice’s work, though much of Maurice’s everyday world was passing rapidly into history before his camera, a factor that seems influence his work. There are moments where Maurice undoubtedly seeks to monumentalise the everyday, to elevate it to the sublime. Though, more often than not, the world is presented at face value, a place where Maurice finds no shortage of beauty. At times, Maurice’s search for beauty and preservation of tradition result in kitsch representations, a pornography of nostalgia, echoing elements of romantic nationalism. Yet he appears to approach St Helier’s changing townscape with the same curious pursuit of beauty, whether he was photographing the new or the old.
Maurice’s focus on social relations and cultural traditions draws natural correlations with conservative aesthetics and nationalist politics, yet he appears to have retained a more open and flexible concept of beauty, one that leaves us a more rounded visual legacy. It is fair to say resulting photographic practice is exemplary in its vision and execution, it demands further study and a place in the pantheon Jersey photography.