Photo: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
There is a photo of Joy Gregory taken late last year, just after she realizes she has won the £110,000 Freelands Prize. Her face is a picture and expresses her sincere, breathtaking, oh-my-god-that-just-happened-i-need-a-drink levels of shock. When she heard her name, Gregory - who is best known for the photographic art she has been creating since the early 1980s - assumed it was an honorable mention, that she was simply a "worthy" also-runner. "Because we always have been," says the British-Jamaican with a wry smile as we chat in her studio.
Gregory's workspace is located in the heart of Camberwell. In the ten years she has been here, this part of South London has changed. Cranes lifting giant sheets of glass in front of luxury apartments accentuate the skyline of neighboring Elephant and Castle, while competition for homes is fierce. Gregory, 64, has just rented out her nearby flat and had as many as 500 applicants. During the same period, the art world's opinion of artists like Gregory - black British women - has also changed dramatically. Suddenly they are hot property.
People like me have been told what to do for generations. I wouldn't go through with that
Over the past decade, a long line of previously marginalized black female British artists and writers have finally gotten their comeuppance as they reach middle age. First Lubaina Himid won the Turner Prize at the age of 63 in 2017; two years later Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker; other Turner nominations followed for Ingrid Pollard and Barbara Walker. Meanwhile, Helen Cammock and Veronica Ryan have both won the Turner since Himid - and Liz Johnson Artur was among the recipients of a scholarship in 2020, awarded in place of the canceled prize. As we talk, there is a major retrospective of Claudette Johnson's work at London's Courtauld, while in 2022 another contemporary of Gregory - Sonia Boyce - won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.
"Those people have always been there, but no light was ever really shone on them," says Gregory, adding that the opportunities for her as a young artist in the 1980s as a photographer were even greater. 'When I left university, the director of Tate [Alan Bowness] said that photography over his dead body would be included in his collection because it is not an art form. And also to be of colour...' But now Gregory's name can be added to that list: as part of the Freelands Prize (from which Gregory will receive £30,000), London's Whitechapel Gallery will stage a mid-career retrospective for Gregory in 2025. .
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Gregory grew up in Aylesbury, the county town of Buckinghamshire. "When you're a person of color in a place where it's essentially all white, the attention is always there," says the artist, a shy, dyslexic girl. She spent her childhood "trying to disappear," a task that was easier said than done in a town with only a few black families. "Every time you do something, it's always about being representative of a people, rather than representing yourself."
Art provided an escape: her childhood home was close to a printing shop, where she spent long summer days leafing through books that had been deemed defective and discarded. It was these sessions, reading writers like Nell Dunn - combined with access to her school's darkroom - that launched Gregory into art and photography.
Perhaps fittingly for someone who tried so hard to fade into the background, Gregory's work is often about what is seen and what is not. Her most famous image, Autoportrait, sits above the fireplace as we talk. It is a series of nine self-portraits in which Gregory poses: looking through the lens, over her shoulder and straight up so that we see the details of her neck. The lack of black models in the fashion magazines she loved (Gregory dreamed of working at Vogue when she was young and once applied for work in the darkroom at Condé Nast) partly inspired Autoportrait. It is typical Gregory: playful and approachable or, as she likes to say, "seductive".
This is a quality she attributes to taking a commercial photography course at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1980s, where she lived in the infamous Crescents housing estate in Hulme. There, Gregory learned the technical aspects of photography, including the use of cyanotype prints, which are made by placing objects on treated paper before exposing them to UV light, which triggers a reaction that creates a brilliant blue image. Gregory then went to the Royal College of Art and studied with John Hedgecoe, who made portraits of the Queen, worked for Vanity Fair and was Britain's first professor of photography.
Other works scattered throughout her studio tell the story of her evolution as an artist. There is the Cinderella Tours Europe series, in which she took photographs of famous backdrops, such as the 110-metre-high statue of Christ the Redeemer in Lisbon and the canals of Venice, with a pair of golden shoes in the foreground, representing the shoes of the former colonies who had been brought to the island. who wants to know everything about European history, but who could never visit the continent.
By the early 2000s, her work had shifted from self-portraits to long-term collaborations with underrepresented groups that fascinated her. Memory and Skin, her first major solo exhibition, featured interviews and images of people she met in Cuba, Haiti and her parents' home country: Jamaica. It took years to collect and play with the legacy of colonialism, showing how the ties between the Caribbean, Britain and other European countries shape contemporary life. Some of her projects last even longer: she is currently working for twenty years with a group from the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, who are the last speakers of the dying N/uu language.
Looking at her work now, most people would say it fits into the world of black art that emerged in the 1980s - politically oriented, tackling issues such as colonialism and slavery. But during the Thatcher era, Gregory's work - which was always more subtle than, for example, Eddie Chambers' collage work, which combined the union jack and a swastika - was not considered 'black enough'. She remembers submitting her work, images of fauna and flowers, for consideration in an exhibition on black photography, but it was rejected. "I was a bit angry at the time. I was like, 'What do you mean it's not black enough?' But then it was about fitting within a certain framework of what black visual art could be.
She continues, "They built their own prison, in a sense. The whole point of me being able to do my practice was that I had the choice to do what I wanted, and not what someone else dictated that I should do. People like me have been told what to do for generations; I wouldn't continue with that."
Gregory seems to take pleasure in questioning expectations of her. When an institution in Barcelona asked her to contribute to an exhibition about the black presence in Europe, she knew the organizers wanted her to "take photos of black people shopping in Brixton market." Gregory had other plans. She produced images of East India Dock and Kennington Common - locations around the capital that were key locations in the history of Black London. There was not a carrying bag in sight.
While she welcomes the recognition that the Freelands award brings, Gregory says it is not the praise she appreciates most. That comes from students, like the young artist she taught at Slade, who recognized her and said she had always wanted to meet her. "It's a bit like being an underground person," says Gregory. "People know the practice, but I am not one of those people who have a gallery." (She was briefly represented by Zelda Cheatle in the 80s.) Although that could soon change.
Gregory has just signed up to produce work for Terminal 4 at Heathrow, for which she has been working with asylum seekers held in hotels near the airport. Her work also currently appears on the maps of the London Underground: a floral print called A Little Slice of Paradise, inspired by the mini gardens that employees create at stations in the capital. In the week leading up to our interview, I try about half a dozen stations, but can't find any. Gregory tells me they are now all over eBay - another sign that her work has reached critical mass. "My niece," she says, "has been in Bond Street harassing the station staff trying to get one."
The recognition, the awards and the larger platform are all welcome, but you get the sense that Gregory would like to continue working the way she has since the 1980s - on her own terms and in her own way. She doesn't make art for the prizes. "It's something I've been forced to do," she tells me. "I have to take pictures."
That desire touches all parts of her life: after our conversation, Gregory tells us that she is going to spend the rest of the day making a photo album as a birthday present for her sister. Is she going to use cyanotype, I ask, imagining a complex semi-industrial process. "No," she says. "I'm going to Snappy Snaps."