Post Office From a Car

Silver gelatin photograph entitled 'Post Office from a car', by Humphrey Spender, Bolton, 1937. Three women talking in the street.

Humphrey Spender (1910 - 2005) was a British photographer who worked for Picture Post magazine and the Daily Mirror newspaper during the 1930s. Working under the name 'Lensman' Spender also worked for the Mass Observation team from 1937 onwards.

Mass Observation was an anthropological project, founded in 1937, which set out to study the lives of the people in the town of Bolton, Lancashire. Known as the 'Worktown Project', a team of paid investigators went into a variety of public situations: meetings, religious services, sporting and leisure activities, in the street and at work, and recorded people's behaviour and conversation in as much detail as possible.