Lomography in Leith

The project is a collaboration with Prof Carl Alan Smith at the University of Arkansas, who will be a visiting scholar (by distance) in HCA in November 2025.

The project originates from two strands of my own historical research:

1. “Everyday public history” (see Halstead 2022). This research focuses on the ways in which people engage with history through everyday activities like walking, talking, or photographing without “expert” intervention from academics or heritage professionals.
2. “In situ displacement” (see Halstead 2020). This project explores the understudied phenomenon of in situ displacement: disruption to people’s sense of place caused not by migration but by major changes to their local natural and built landscapes.

In both cases, interviewing and ethnography have been core to my practice.

Prof Smith and I have worked together at the British School at Athens on the Hellinikon site and on Prof Smith’s contribution to my recently published reader in everyday life history (Ferris & Halstead 2025) and have established strong, mutual areas of interest. Through a pilot project in Leith, we are integrating our approaches into a joint method of enquiry: an innovative new methodology that involves combining ethnographic fieldwork, photography, and Prof Smith’s use of perceptual drawing (on which, see below). Working collaboratively with student volunteers and members of the public, alongside our own self-reflective “autoethnographic” practice, we will use the case study of Leith to develop a methodology for understanding how long-term and macro-scale anthropogenic urban change affects everyday spatial imaginaries and sense of place, self, and history on micro-scales.

A critical aspect of this innovation is our adaptation of Prof Smith’s community- and storytelling-driven drawing practice to photography and ethnography. As a landscape architect, Prof Smith advocates for a shift away from the collation of (spatial) data towards (place) “knowing” through perceptual sketches or “gestural drawing” that emphasise not precise representational recreation of space but the everyday layering of history, memory, feeling, and the senses that create place. Inspired by the long-term use of photography in anthropology and human geography as well as more recent use of multi-media “ethnographic bricolage” by scholars like the geographer Asa Roast, we are developing a perceptual and gestural approach to photography.

I am particularly interested in the role that public history initiatives like this can play in contributing to public discourse on heritage, development, and urban change. By using ethnography, photography, and drawing to document personal and affective relationships to place, this project has the potential to provide a crucial corrective to planning procedures that tend to focus narrowly on tangible or aesthetic rather than affective considerations when assessing urban change. The outputs will have the capacity to empower local communities to assert influence over decision-making in public policy by demonstrating that the urban landscape is suffused with personal historical meanings that cannot simply be reduced to the standout architectural heritage celebrated by the “authorised heritage discourse”.