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This project came about because I was giving a talk on the British-Jamaican photographer and critic Maxine Walker back in 2019, and I assumed quite blithely that there would be lots of information in the books and magazines in the London College of Communication library. But I found nothing. Then I went to Chelsea College of Art, knowing that their librarian Liz [Ward] had collected some work by people of colour. But again, the bookshelves were bare. I decided that I had to do something about this.
The 1980s and ’90s was a very active period. People were producing a huge diversity of work. You can see that range here, in Mumtaz Karimjee’s richly coloured landscape photographs, which she made in China, and Ingrid Pollard’s collages exploring the idealised male body.
Being black in the 1980s and ’90s was very different from being black today, and the way in which people talk about feminism and “womanism” — Alice Walker’s term for black feminists — was very different too. I remember sitting in a room at a photography festival called Signals in 1992 with a couple of other people of colour, and being told that there weren’t any black female photographers in the UK. I thought, I can’t believe I’m hearing this. People weren’t doing the research, they were just looking to America, to photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems or Lorna Simpson, rather than to their own shores. I see someone like Suzanne Roden, who was making beautiful studio portraits in the 1990s, and I think, Why isn’t she known? She’s almost like an Avedon.
So it was a very simple idea: to make a record of the pictures that were lacking in the archives. Since the book has been published, some women who had stopped making work have started again. A publication like this gives people permission to believe in themselves.
Ingrid Pollard
Born Georgetown, Guyana
I saw this work for the first time at Ingrid’s retrospective at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes a few years ago, and I was so impressed by the complexity of her practice. “Contenders” is such a multi-faceted depiction of masculinity. It shows that people were playing with really different ways of making and thinking about visual culture.
Carole Wright
Born London, UK
Wright has been documenting the black community in Brixton and other parts of south London for decades. If she hadn’t done that, these pictures wouldn’t exist. That was what became important about the project as it emerged: it told stories that hadn’t been told in the press at the time. They were hidden.
This photograph shows the tender relationship that can exist between a father and daughter. Carole captures the subject’s self-assured presence, at once strong and vulnerable. That’s one of her great skills. But what I love most about this image is the pride that her subjects seem to have in being themselves.
Mumtaz Karimjee
Born Mumbai, India
Karimjee was one of the only people I knew who was recording the daily lives of women in China. It was 1978 and she was still a student, so she was a real pioneer. I love this picture for its dreamlike otherworldliness, the graininess, the subtle blues, the barely defined figures.
Glynis A Neslen
Born Bishop’s Stortford, UK
When I look at this photograph of Angela Davis at the Hackney Town Hall, it reminds me of the sense of the community that flowed back and forth across the Atlantic between black women, and between women working in different artforms. We drew so much support from each other’s voices.
“Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain”, by Joy Gregory (ed), with associate editor Dr Taous Dahmani, co-published by MACK and Autograph
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