Postwar Photos

National Trust curator Catherine Troiano explains the advances in photography in the decades following the Second World War

Catherine Troiano outlines the advances in photography in the decades following the Second World War

The end of the Second World War brought enormous social and economic change to Britain. By this point, photography was commonplace in daily life, widely used by people across the board. Photographs captured how the country readjusted to normality after the end of a global conflict; the economic boom and demographic shifts of the 1950s and 1960s; and the motions through modernity, postmodernity and ‘digitality’ in the later 20th century.

In the 1940s and 1950s, photographic technologies continued to advance, and photography became increasingly accessible. Colour photography, in particular, experienced huge uptake having been commercially available since the mid-1930s. At the same time, class systems that had propped up British society for centuries were challenged, and photography played an important role in capturing polarised experiences of British life. Trying to understand the varied contexts of images and why they might have been made, collected or exchanged can help us learn more about the past through photographs and the role photography played in evolving social realities.

The National Trust holds photography collections numbering approximately 550,000 objects, which are dispersed across 250 sites in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. They were largely amassed as part of property acquisitions, which has kept intact the nuanced perspectives of the people who collected or made these photographs. As such, the National Trust preserves histories of how photography has featured in family life across Britain, from the earliest days of photography to today. You can see more photographs in the collection at nationaltrustcollections.org.uk.