The London Metropolitan Archives
On 15th February 2017, myself and representatives of the Digital Panopticon team had a meeting with the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) about an upcoming Digital Panopticon themed exhibition to be held at the LMA. The exhibition will tell stories of people convicted at the Old Bailey in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The exhibition will focus on the shift in punishment from hanging, branding and whipping to transportation and imprisonment in the period 1780 to 1925. This historical shift essentially represents the move from punishing the bodies of convicts to reforming their minds.
William Hogarth ‘A Rake’s Progress: The Prison Scene’.
Digital Panopticon representatives also had the opportunity to take a look at the LMA’s current exhibition, ‘The Londoners: Portrait of a Working City’ , which brings together images of city life from the fifteenth-century to the present-day. The show features visual material from the eighteenth and nineteenth century including prints, etchings and plates of eighteenth-century street life by Paul Sandby, Thomas Rowlandson and William Hogarth.
I’ll be coordinating the project over the coming months as well as working with the LMA to devise a series of exhibition related public engagement events. Here’s to an exciting new project!