Black Chronicles - The Missing Chapter Inspiration
“There’s nothing like a photograph for reminding you about the difference. There it is. It stares you ineradicably in the face” - Professor Stuart Hall, 2008
National Portrait displayed the Black Chronicles in 2017 with over forty photographs presenting a unique snapshot of black lives and experiences in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with Autograph ABP. Autograph ABP is a London-based arts charity that works internationally in photography and film, race, representation, cultural identity and human rights.
These portraits of individuals of African and Asian heritage bear witness to Britain’s imperial history of empire and expansion. They highlight an important and complex black presence in Britain before 1948, a watershed moment when the Empire Windrush brought the first large group of Caribbean immigrants to Britain. Research is ongoing and new information emerges continuously.
Here some photographs I had taken at National Portrait at that time. These photographs have been led by the photographer Othello De’Souza Hartley.
