Acknowledgements

This book is called Through Our Own Eyes - as if those who painted the pictures, embroidered the patchworks and so on, were also its authors. But I have been constantly aware that it is my own eye which has made the choice of reproductions. In every case, a very small selection has been made from hundreds of images, which themselves may have been sifted from thousands more by other intermediaries. In most, though not quite all cases the artists remained unknown to me personally. While I wanted to efface myself, and simply point to the existence of an extraordinary popular vitality, I also knew I was constructing an argument, according tO ideas which have been strongly influenced by the work of contemporary'professional' artists and writers. But just as a number of these artists have shown in their work, in diverse ways, that 'where one speaks, several speak,' I also wanted to try to avoid a single vantage-point. My position is between, and ! wanted to take as a theme the relationship between people, moments of historical crisis, and the visual means of expression.