Her exploration of Picturing Lockdown builds on Dr Pollen's previous work on mass-participation photography projects from the 1980s onward, chronicled in her 2015 book , which received a paperback publication earlier this year.
Dr Pollen said: “I was really pleased to be asked to undertake this analysis and to put my research into historic mass-participation photography to contemporary use. There has been a huge flowering of participatory public history projects during 2020 and 2021 as people yearn to try to make sense of unprecedented experiences under COVID, and to record images for posterity.
“Many of these projects use photography as a tool to communicate complex feelings, and through my experience analysing large scale photographic archives and public participation projects, I can help make sense of these materials now and for the future."