The Dioramas

A few months ago, while recording material for a radio programme about the project we were introduced to Stefan Dickers, the magnificent librarian of Bishopsgate Institute in east London. It was excellent timing – not only does Stefan have a wonderful voice for radio but also a great passion for diaries, social history and dynamic ambitions for his library. We began meeting there to discuss the future direction of the project, started making a film and cataloguing some of the existing collection, as well as new diaries brought to us in response to the Radio 4 programme in June, which was brilliantly produced by Tamsin Hughes and highlighted on ‘Pick of the Week’...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhi9xKGGWX8&feature=plcp

The recent acquisitions include a series of elegant Christian Dior diaries written by a journalist working on News Chronicle in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, who notoriously declared in an article at the time that Marilyn Monroe was a frump ‘with a spare tyre’. Her precisely written, neat little volumes of appointment diaries came with a black and white Film Noir style photo of the writer looking glamorous – no spare tyre in sight. Another unusual arrival was a collection of diaries that spanned over 20 years depicting an almost identical daily sketch of the diarist’s face and a weather update.

At the same time as we began working at Bishopsgate, Stefan also invested in a set of beautifully restored dioramas depicting scenes of 19th century life in east London – dimly lit bars and markets on cobbled streets, inhabited by tiny gloomy looking figures complete with real human hair. The dioramas were brought in for display at Bishopsgate and given a launch party accompanied by a live soundtrack of Django Reinhardt style music. Here in the library the faded dioramas twinkled weakly across the room with their tiny Victorian lamplights – finally being gazed into again after years under dust in the back room of an east end pub. It seems possible to draw parallels between the diorama and the diary, which both give magical vignettes of small-scale scenarios, somewhat clumsily placed.