Photography and Blackness

I have tens of thousands of photographs. In fact, that’s probably just from the last 18 months. I’m unable to take just one photograph - I have to take 20, just to make sure I captured the moment. I know it’s a ridiculous habit to have but it’s also one that I’m really unwilling to break. 

Every time I take Ramona or Jack’s photograph, it’s an attempt to capture how they made me feel in that moment. Jack will do something or Ramona will walk into the room, and my heart leaps up, just like my mum jumps off the sofa whenever she hears The Supremes. A wave of happiness just completely fills me up and that’s what I’m trying to capture - I want everybody to see it and feel it, I want them to look at it when I’m not around and see it for what it is: a record of all of the incredible happiness that they give me, the little moments that make up everything good in my life. 

I appreciate that that is probably an impossible task. But there are times when I’m scrolling through the hundreds of photos I’ve taken in a single day and I see it, the moment. I see it and I feel it all over again. 

But there’s also a larger significance. Something that feels larger yet more intimate. 

The art world - galleries, museums, exhibitions, even professional careers - isn’t a place that feels as open to us, to black and brown people. As the child of immigrants, I didn’t know that being an artist was a career option; that I could have been a set designer or photographer or interior designer or graphic artist or musical star. We just wanted to fit in and lead a good life that was stable and secure and gave our parents a sense of peace; that coming to this country wasn’t a mistake, that they had achieved the one goal that carried them over here in the first place. When I went to galleries as a child (my mum took us to a lot of galleries when we were little because they were free and large enough for us to spend hours and get good and tired), I didn’t see anybody that looked like me or would even have acknowledged me. Paintings that featured black people had us standing in the background, eyes to the ground or raised up in adoration at the corseted woman in the frilly, white wig that owned them. Paintings and sculptures never really seemed to reflect me or to record my history beyond slavery. 

If I wanted to see my past, the lives of the people that came before me, I had to go to my parents bedroom and pull out the battered suitcases from under the bed. I’d pull on the zip, grimacing at the rips in the material and praying that I didn’t make them any worse, smiling as the old, dusty smell rose into the room. I’d fling the lid back and look down at hundreds of photographs - both loose and in old photo albums. Photographs taken by my parents and their parents, photographs of great-uncles and great-grandmothers, photographs of the house my dad was born in, the garden my great-uncle tended long into his 90s, my grandmother and her brothers as children sat in front of a studio backdrop.  

No half naked children in chains, no men in bright colours sitting at the feet of preening aristocracy; just love and family and joy. Real, feel it beating through the film happiness. Photography, or any record, of black happiness and experiences feels like art, it feels important and it feels like something that should be celebrated. 

I love the shared language of our culture, something that would be invisible to anybody else without photography. It feels like, until recently, all of our history was only really visible in the records that we made ourselves, in our home videos and photo albums. 

And now that the wider world is acknowledging the beautiful variety of our culture, we’re seeing more and more celebration of black art and lives. But, no matter the exhibition, photography is always a key feature. I may not see people like me in the frames hanging at the National Gallery but then I see photographs in collections like at Queer Britain, the Horniman Museum, the Black Cultural Archives and the Mixed Museum and I see my history. The divine “In The Black Fantastic” exhibition at the Southbank Centre this summer (honestly one of the most incredible gallery experiences I’ve ever had - review to follow) was bursting with vibrant creative expression in every artistic method imaginable and photography was an essential element for so many of the artists.

There’s power in portraits of black people by black people. There’s community in seeing photographs of the plastic on the hallway floor and on the furniture in the ‘good’ living room; the fashions - the sharp crease in the bell bottoms; knowing how much love and pride went into the hairstyles because my mum and godmother would sit and tell me all about it. In those images I can see the lives of my own family but also the lives of the people who made up their community at a time when often that was all that they had. 

In my job we talk about the iconography of architecture, the messages sent and received in portraiture and frescoes but I want to talk about the photos of cousins huddled in a garden or in the park for photos to send "back home" to nan, about the courage and defiance of young black couples travelling in western Europe in the 60s and 70s, groups of boys and girls eyeing each other up across the dance-floor at sound system parties in South London, and the proud winner standing with the trophy he won at the London Transport staff Olympics. 

There is a hope and a strength and a support system in our recorded histories that is very rarely visible in the mainstream media and collected histories so I will keep making this record and it will change and flow with our lives but it will exist. 

I will always take too many photographs, of everything, because of the significance it will continue to hold for all of those who come after me. In however-many years from now, when they see headlines from the last two years, I want them to also see we were happy and in love and we travelled and we existed. Despite everything, we flourished.