Photography and Political Blackness

The intention of Photography and Political Blackness, as explained by the panel chair and co-curator of The 80s: Photographing Britain, Jasmine Chohan, was to explore how political blackness influenced British photography, ‘and question whether the term has a place in our society today’. While the conversation was engaging and informative, exploring the four panellists’ varied approaches to expanding photography’s possibilities, community practice, collaboration and publishing, the discussion was somewhat limited by its socio-political framing.

Twenty years ago the art historian Kobena Mercer wrote that ‘the dignity of objecthood is very rarely bestowed on the diaspora’s works of art, on the actual art objects themselves’.1 Mercer was critiquing the tendency among critics, curators and art historians to focus on the biography of artists of colour, or their experiences of exclusion from art’s major institutions, over and above their artworks. Stuart Hall made similar comments in a 2006 paper, observing an inability ‘to make connections between works of art and wider social histories without collapsing the former or displacing the latter’.2 I was interested to see if and how artworks might emerge within a discussion with such a contentious socio-political frame.

Introducing the discussion, Chohan addressed the controversial nature of the topic, stating that ‘“Political blackness” is a term that was most widely used in the 1970s and 1980s and the roots of it can be found in the British anti-racist statements of the period’. She added that ‘anyone from a group affected by racism could identify as politically black to form a united group … The term itself is now considered problematic by some and still useful to others’. For some, ‘political blackness’ erases difference, reflecting the white supremacist belief that ‘Afro-Caribbeans and Asians [are] so much alike that they could be subsumed and mobilised under a single political category’.3 For others, particularly feminists, it has been a generative framework for decentring whiteness and forging solidarity through difference.4 Interestingly, similar claims have been made about the concept of the ‘British Black Arts Movement’. What is it that makes art ‘Black’, and can such a disparate group of artists be considered a ‘capital M’ Movement? The phrase provides some artists visibility and recognition, but does it limit our interpretation of their work? Who and what is excluded from this art historical and curatorial shorthand?5

Each artist on the panel was invited to explain their route into photography. Roshini Kempadoo grew up in Guyana and was inspired by Caribbean literature, Caribbean theory and artists she knew in her youth, as well as being motivated to challenge the misrepresentations of the Caribbean that she encountered in the United Kingdom. Al-An deSouza trained as a painter but became interested in photography through working with Community CopyArt, a photocopy and print organisation. As his artistic practice developed, he explained, photography became a medium through which he could transform himself and his experiences: ‘My initial relationship to photography wasn’t necessarily to produce images, but to recontextualise the images that we were surrounded by.’ Joy Gregory explained that she was ‘really interested in photography as a material’. She started working on community projects after studying at Manchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art. ‘That’s when I really began my education around the power of the image and how to use that, but also around the politics of race.’ Marc Boothe describes his route to photography as ‘a series of accidents’. He worked in software programming but, after a near-fatal car accident, he realised that he had not documented his life; he bought a camera and taught himself how to take and process images, aiming to ‘capture stories from different perspectives’.

Although Thatcherism decimated public services in the 1980s, the decade was also a time of unprecedented access to arts funding, from both the Arts Council and Greater London Council. ‘It was a kind of confluence’, deSouza explained. ‘There was funding, but you had to have something in place before you apply.’ Artists collaborated to establish collectives, enabling them to share resources and apply for grants. Gregory co-founded Polareyes in 1987, a journal by and about Black women’s photography; Kempadoo was a founding member of The Association of Black Photographers, begun in 1988; deSouza co-founded the Panchayat Archive; and Boothe helped initiate the D-Max collective. ‘It was about establishing your own spaces’, Gregory explained, ‘and these were our spaces.’

Following these introductions, Chohan brought up the evening’s theme. Referencing today’s tendency to discuss diasporic art in terms of South Asian art and Black art, she described a greater sense of unity in the 1980s and asked panellists: ‘How did you find yourselves working amongst one another, and how did you find support in these totally multicultural spaces?’ Roshini Kempadoo’s response was honest but nuanced and worth quoting at length.

‘I don’t want to mythologise the 80s too much … There was something that was happening in a moment in the 80s, particularly in London … But we didn’t call it “politically black” at that point, so there’s something interesting about how it’s being defined now, which I don’t really necessarily agree with. I think the idea of putting “political” in front of it at this point in time is not helpful … And while it held for a while, it actually broke up quite quickly … Stuart [Hall] talks about deep significant difference, and those differences began to show.‘

The Stuart Hall essay Kempadoo referenced is ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, which warns against reading artworks as direct reflections of artists’ identities. Cultural identity is ‘not an essence but a positioning’, Hall argues, and artworks should not be understood as ‘a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists’. Instead, he sees them as a ‘form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects … to construct those points of identification, those positionalities we call in retrospect our “cultural identities”’.6 Hall’s argument suggests that the (politically) ‘Black British artist’ might be a subject position constructed through the production of art; it perhaps does not reflect a pre-existing, shared ideology expressed through artistic production.

Since the 2010s major arts institutions have been rushing to commission, exhibit and collect works by artists they had consistently ignored for over two decades. These artists deserve the platform a gallery like Tate can provide, and audiences deserve opportunities to encounter their works. Exhibitions, displays and events that group artists in terms of identity have been a powerful means of broadening understandings of British art histories. However, having completed the groundwork of broad inclusion, I hope we can move on to consider the work of Black artists from the 1980s in detail. If we prioritise the formal, material and conceptual qualities of artworks, asking artists about their interests and intentions, we can build a richer and more nuanced image of this critical decade.7 If the varied approaches artists adopted to address Britishness, Blackness, antiracism and institutional politics are what make this artistic period so compelling, they warrant detailed, individual analysis.