Africa 05 (2005)

Keith Piper, Donald Rodney and the Artists' Response to the Archive (2006)

Ali Kazim (2006)

Barbara Walker (2006)

The Importance Of Being Lady Lucy (2007)

Black British Photography (2007)

Port City (2008)

Next We Change Earth (2008)

The next body of photographs that act as benchmarks of the post-war presence of Caribbean immigrants are studio portraits. These portraits, primarily dating from the 1960s and 70s, were produced by numerous high street photographers who drew much of their patronage from the immigrant communities. The portraits invariably consisted of individuals or small groups of family members, again, dressed in their finest clothes, or their professional uniforms, against a variety of studio backdrops.

Caribbean immigrants and their families in effect commissioned portraits that indicted a real or imagined sense of career development and individual prosperity. Sitters were frequently photographed wearing the uniforms of their professions, such as transport or nursing. At a time when very few Caribbean immigrants could afford to have telephones in their homes, many were photographed speaking into telephones. These images were frequently sent back to family and friends back ‘home’. High street photographers provided an invaluable service to their patrons, who could ill afford their own cameras. Various factors contributed to the demise of the high street photographer and by the late 1970s such studios had become a rarity, though, correspondingly perhaps, a sense of black British photography had began to emerge and develop.

One of the first British-based black people to distinguish themselves in the field of photography was Vanley Burke. Born in Jamaica in 1951, Burke came to England in 1965, having received his first camera as a present for his tenth birthday a few years earlier. For him, ‘Photography started to develop as a means of looking at people and how they lived.’ To this end, he became responsible for producing many highly engaging photographs of Birmingham’s Caribbean communities, through the course of the later decades of the 20th century. These photographs - depicting Black people at work, at play, at church, on the streets, and in their homes - have come to be regarded as key documents chronicling the lives of black people in the country’s second largest city. Through these images, we can chart the development, importance and the growing confidence of black Britain. In Burke’s photographs we see elderly Black men playing dominoes in a local pub, groups of young people hanging out in the park, baptisms, weddings, and burials. We see also confrontations between the police and young Blacks, people dancing, portraits of college graduates, and many other things illustrative of a vibrant, confident and multifaceted community of black British people. Unfortunately, Burke’s pictures suffer from a debilitating lack of referencing, so viewers are invariably left to calculate for themselves the approximate date of his documentary photographs. This lack of definitive reference points mars what would otherwise be an extraordinarily important document of the growth and coming of age of black Britain.

Horace Ové must also be considered a pioneering figure of black British photography. He was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1939 and came to London as a young man. Over the course of the 1970s, Ové became known as one of a small number of the leading black independent film-makers to emerge in Britain . He is widely respected for his pioneering and ground-breaking work as a director of films such as Pressure. Made in 1975, the film tackles the issues that came to shape and influence the lives of a new generation of black Britons. A timely, engaging and deeply empathetic work, Pressure was, and remains, a gritty and dynamic study of a generation in crisis.

Ové was responsible for the most compelling documentation of the development of a uniquely British element of African diasporic cultural identity. He photographed Samuel Selvon, Andrew Salkey and John La Rose, the founding members of the Caribbean Artists' Movement. He also photographed the birth and development of the Notting Hill Carnival and the growing importance of reggae music to British youth. Like others before and alongside him, we see in Ové’s work copious and fascinating evidence of the clothing styles of black Britain from the 1960s onwards.