Annebella Pollen

Annebella Pollen is Professor of Visual and Material Culture at University of Brighton, UK. Her research areas include mass photography and the popular image, and histories of art, craft, design and dress, especially marginal, alternative and non-canonical forms.

She is the author of Nudism in a Cold Climate: The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (2021) and The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians (2015), a study of a 1920s utopian English youth group, which won a Most Beautiful Book prize from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, and was accompanied by a 2015-16 exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery.

Annebella’s research in photography has covered the subject of found photos, family albums, vernacular archives, amateur competitions and the photographic industry; this work underpins her book, Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life (2015) and her co-edited collection, Photography Reframed: New Visions in Contemporary Photographic Culture (2018).

Histories of fashion and graphic design inform Annebella's popular image research, which includes studies of Victorian valentines, Edwardian postcards and the silhouette portrait. She co-edited Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice (2015) and has authored essays on dressing-up costume, political uniforms, secondhand clothes and dress reform.