Armet Francis | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Photographer |
Years active | 1969–present |
Known for | Co-founder of Autograph ABP |
Notable work | The Black Triangle Roots to Reckoning |
Armet Francis (born 29 January 1945) [1] is a Jamaican-born photographer and publisher who has lived in London since the 1950s. [2] He has been documenting and chronicling the lives of people of the African diaspora for more than 40 years and his assignments have included work for The Times Magazine , The Sunday Times Supplement , BBC and Channel 4. [3]
He has exhibited worldwide and his work is in collections including those of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of London. One of his best known photographs is 1964's "Self Portrait in Mirror". [4]
Armet Francis was born in Saint Elizabeth Parish, in rural Jamaica, in 1945. He was left in the care of his grandparents at the age of three when his parents moved to London, England, where Francis joined them seven years later in 1955. [2] Interviewed for the British Library's Oral History of British Photography, Francis spoke of growing up as the only black child in a school in London Docklands. [5] After leaving school at 14, he worked for an engineering firm in Bromley, before finding a job as an assistant in a West End photographic studio, and going on to forge a career as a freelance photographer for fashion magazines and advertising campaigns. [6]
He has said: "In 1969 I embarked on a lifetime project.... I was living and working in the first world, materially that is, but becoming more aware of inequalities to the third world, to be more specific the Black World. As a Black photographer I started to realise I had no social documentary images in my work.... I went back [to Jamaica] in 1969.... I had been away 14 years, it would take another 14 years to make sense of this project." [7] Following his participation at Festac '77 (the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture) [8] in Lagos, Nigeria, he became devoted to photographing the people of the African diaspora.
He became the first Black photographer to have a solo exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London when The Black Triangle series was exhibited there in 1983. [2] He published a book also entitled The Black Triangle the following year, and Children of the Black Triangle was produced four years later. He was a contributing photographer in the survey issue of Ten.8 vol. 2, no. 3, 1992, titled Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 80s. [9]
In 1988, Francis was a co-founder of the Association of Black Photographers (now Autograph ABP). [2] He was the official photographer for Africa '05, a major celebration of African arts held throughout 2005 in the UK. [10] [11] Francis was one of three pioneering Jamaican-born photographers – the others being Charlie Phillips and Neil Kenlock – whose work was showcased in the 2005/2006 exhibition Roots to Reckoning at the Museum of London, [10] [12] which in 2009 with the assistance of Art Fund acquired the "Roots to Reckoning archive", comprising 90 photographs of London's black community from the 1960s to the 1980s. [6] [13]
The British Library conducted an interview (C459/214) with Francis in 2013 for its Oral History of British Photography collection. [1]
Photographs by Francis featured prominently in Staying Power, the collaborative project mounted in 2015 by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and the Black Cultural Archives. [14] [15] [16] "The arresting first image in the V&A museum is Jamaican photographer Armet Francis's Self-portrait in Mirror (1964), a curiously intimate and honest image showing Armet setting up his shot directly in front of a mirror," noted the reviewer for Culture Whisper, [17] while Brennavan Sritharan commented in the British Journal of Photography : "Self-portraiture is something of a sub-theme, with Armet Francis' tender yet assertive self-portrait leading the exhibit." [18]
In February 2022, Francis was named in CasildART's list of the top six Black British photographers, alongside Charlie Phillips, James Barnor, Neil Kenlock, Pogus Caesar and Vanley Burke. [19]
Works by Francis are held in the following public collections:
Pogus Caesar is a British artist, archivist, author, curator, television producer and director. He was born in St Kitts, West Indies, and grew up in Birmingham, England.
Nicholas David Gordon Knight is a British fashion photographer and founder and director of SHOWstudio.com. He is an honorary professor at University of the Arts London and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the same university. He has produced books of his work including retrospectives Nicknight (1994) and Nick Knight (2009). In 2016, Knight's 1992 campaign photograph for fashion brand Jil Sander was sold by Phillips auction house at the record-breaking price of HKD 2,360,000.
Dennis Morris is a British photographer, best known for his images of Bob Marley and the Sex Pistols.
Ronald "Charlie" Phillips, also known by the nickname "Smokey", is a Jamaican-born restaurateur, photographer, and documenter of black London. He is now best known for his photographs of Notting Hill during the period of West Indian migration to London; however, his subject matter has also included film stars and student protests, with his photographs having appeared in Stern, Harper’s Bazaar, Life and Vogue and in Italian and Swiss journals. Notable recent shows by Phillips include How Great Thou Art, "a sensitive photographic documentary of the social and emotional traditions that surround death in London's African Caribbean community".
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, born Oluwarotimi Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode, was a Nigerian photographer who at the age of 11 moved with his family to England, fleeing from the Biafran War. A seminal figure in British contemporary art, Fani-Kayode explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions. He created the bulk of his work between 1982 and 1989, the year he died from AIDS-related complications.
Vanley Burke is a British Jamaican photographer and artist. His photographs capture experiences of his community's arrival in Britain, the different landscapes and cultures he encountered, the different ways of survival and experiences of the wider African-Caribbean community.
Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer, educator, feminist, cultural historian, and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She began her career as a writer and poet, becoming a visual artist not long afterwards. By the end of 1985 she had shown her artwork in three exhibitions and her first collection of poetry had been published. Sulter was known for her collaborations with other Black feminist scholars and activists, capturing the lives of Black people in Europe. She was a champion of the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and was fascinated by the Haitian-born French performer Jeanne Duval.
James Barnor Hon. FRPS, OV is a Ghanaian photographer who has been based in London since the 1990s. His career spans six decades, and although for much of that period his work was not widely known, it has latterly been discovered by new audiences. In his street and studio photography, Barnor represents societies in transition in the 1950s and 1960s: Ghana moving toward independence, and London becoming a multicultural metropolis. He has said: "I was lucky to be alive when things were happening...when Ghana was going to be independent and Ghana became independent, and when I came to England the Beatles were around. Things were happening in the 60s, so I call myself Lucky Jim." He was Ghana's first full-time newspaper photographer in the 1950s, and he is credited with introducing colour processing to Ghana in the 1970s. It has been said: "James Barnor is to Ghana and photojournalism what Ousmane Sembène was to Senegal and African cinema."
Black Cultural Archives (BCA) is an archive and heritage centre in Brixton, London, devoted to the histories of people of African and Caribbean descent in Britain. Also known as BCA, it was founded in 1981, by educationalist and historian Len Garrison and others. BCA's mission is to record, preserve and celebrate the history of people of African descent in Britain. The BCA's new building in Brixton, opened in 2014, enables access to the archive collection, provides dedicated learning spaces and mounts a programme of exhibitions and events.
Uzo Egonu was a Nigerian-born artist who settled in Britain in the 1940s, only once returning to his homeland for two days in the 1970s, although he remained concerned with African political struggles. According to Rasheed Araeen, Egonu was "perhaps the first person from Africa, Asia or the Caribbean to come to Britain after the War with the sole intention of becoming an artist." According to critic Molara Wood, "Egonu's work merged European and Igbo traditions but more significantly, placed Africa as the touchstone of modernism. In combining the visual languages of Western and African art, he helped redefine the boundaries of modernism, thereby challenging the European myth of the naïve, primitive African artist."
Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede is a Nigerian poet, storyteller and artist, best known as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor.
Mark Sealy is a British curator and cultural historian with a special interest in the relationship of photography to social change, identity politics and human rights. In 1991 he became the director of Autograph ABP, the Association of Black Photographers, based since 2007 at Rivington Place, a purpose-built international visual arts centre in Shoreditch, London. He has curated several major international exhibitions and is also a lecturer.
Roshini Kempadoo is a British photographer, media artist, and academic. For more than 20 years she has been a lecturer and researcher in photography, digital media production, and cultural studies in a variety of educational institutions, and is currently a professor in Photography and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster.
Colin Jones was an English ballet dancer-turned-photographer and prolific photojournalist of post-war Britain.
Joy Gregory is a British artist. Gregory's work explores concerns related to race, gender and cultural differences in contemporary society. Her work has been published and exhibited worldwide and is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and Government Art Collection in the UK.
Neil Emile Elias Kenlock is a Jamaican-born photographer and media professional who has lived in London since the 1960s. During the 1960s and 1970s, Kenlock was the official photographer of the British Black Panthers, and he has been described as being "at the forefront of documenting the black experience in the UK". Kenlock was the co-founder of Choice FM, the first successful radio station granted a licence to cater for the black community in Britain.
Brenda Patricia Agard was a Black-British photographer, artist, poet and storyteller who was most active in the 1980s, when she participated in some of the first art exhibitions organized by Black-British artists in the United Kingdom. Agard's work focused on creating "affirming images centred on the resilience of the Black woman," according to art historian Eddie Chambers.
Black British identity is the objective or subjective state of perceiving oneself as a black British person and as relating to being black British. Researched and discussed across a wide variety of mediums; the identity usually intersects with, and is driven by, black African and Afro-Caribbean heritage, and association with African diaspora and culture.
Maxine Walker is a British-Jamaican photographer and critic. Based in Handsworth and active between 1985 and 1997, Walker has been described by Rianna Jade Parker as "a force within the Black British Art movement". Her photographs emphasise the fictive nature of documentary convention, and "raise questions about the nature of identity, challenging racial stereotypes".