 Rivington Place, home of Autograph ABP | |
| Established | 1988 |
|---|---|
| Type | Photographic arts agency |
| Headquarters | Rivington Place, Shoreditch, London. |
| Website | www |
Formerly called | Association of Black Photographers |
Autograph ABP, previously known as the Association of Black Photographers, is a British-based international, non-profit-making, photographic arts agency.
Autograph was originally established in London in 1988. [1] Founders included the photographers Sunil Gupta, Monika Baker, Merle Van den Bosch, Pratibha Parmar, Ingrid Pollard, Roshini Kempadoo, Armet Francis and Rotimi Fani-Kayode, [2] as the Association of Black Photographers. Through a programme of advocacy, exhibitions and publication, Autograph went on to assist in the career development of a number of black and "culturally diverse" photographers, including Faisal Abdu'Allah, Gayle Chong Kwan, Roshini Kempadoo and Yinka Shonibare. [3]
In 1991 Mark Sealy became the director of the organisation. [4] In 2002, the board changed the name to "Autograph ABP". [5] In 2007, the organisation moved into its new home Rivington Place, which it shared with Iniva. Renowned Cultural Studies theorist Stuart Hall served as chair on the boards of both organisations. [6] Currently, the honorary patrons of Autograph ABP are David Lammy MP, Professor Catherine Hall, Lola Young (Baroness Young of Hornsey) OBE, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. [7]
In 2008, Autograph received a grant of £660,500 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to "preserve the history of culturally diverse Britain through photography". [8]
Today, Autograph continues to develop, exhibit and publish the work of photographers and artists from culturally diverse backgrounds and to act as an advocate for their inclusion in mainstream areas of exhibition, publishing, training, education and commerce. Autograph produces its own programme of activities, as well as collaborating with other arts organisations nationally and internationally, such as the Liverpool Biennial. It also sees itself as playing a role in the advocacy of human rights worldwide, hosting exhibitions on the subjects of Roma/Gypsy peoples in Europe, as well as the photographic legacy of lynching in the US. [9] Regular (annual) funding for Autograph is provided by Arts Council England. [10]
Sonia Dawn Boyce,, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. With an emphasis on collaborative work, Boyce has been working closely with other artists since 1990, often involving improvisation and spontaneous performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than thirty years in several art colleges across the UK.
Ingrid Pollard is a British artist and photographer. Her work uses portraiture photography and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs such as Britishness or racial difference. Pollard is associated with Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers. She lives and works in London.
Iniva is the Institute of International Visual Art, a visual arts organisation based in London that collaborates with contemporary artists, curators and writers. Iniva runs the Stuart Hall Library, and is based in Pimlico, on the campus of Chelsea College of Arts.
Rivington Place is a purpose-built international visual arts centre in Shoreditch, London.
Oluwarotimi (Rotimi) Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode was a Nigerian-born photographer, who moved to England at the age of 12 to escape the Nigerian Civil War. The main body of his work was created between 1982 and 1989. He explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions.
David A. Bailey, MBE, is a British Afro-Caribbean curator, photographer, writer and cultural facilitator, living and working in London. Among his main concerns are the notions of diaspora and black representation in art.
Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer, educator, and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She first worked as a writer and poet, later turning the visual arts. Sulter was known for her collaborations with other Black feminist scholars and activists, capturing the lives of Black peoples in Europe.
James Barnor HonFRPS 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."
The Stuart Hall Library is the special collections library and archive of Iniva, in Pimlico, London, independent of, but located on the campus of Chelsea College of Arts.
Light Work is a photography center in Syracuse, New York. The artist-run nonprofit supports photographers through a community-access digital lab facility, residencies, exhibitions, and publications.
Format was an agency set up in 1983 to represent women photographers, with the aim of documenting the world from a different perspective. The agency operated for two decades, and its end, in 2003, was marked by an exhibition. In 2010, the National Portrait Gallery, London, showed a range of work by Format photographers.
The Unfinished Conversation is a 2012 multi-layered three-screen installation directed by John Akomfrah, co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective. Through his celebrated technique of juxtaposing and layering archive footage with text, music and photographs, Akomfrah crosses the memory landscape of Stuart Hall, Jamaican-born founder of British Cultural Studies, to reflect on the nature and complexities of memory and identity. The Unfinished Conversation was commissioned by Autograph ABP. It opened at Tate Britain, London, on 26 October 2013, following its premiere at Bluecoat during the 2012 Liverpool Biennial.
Armet Francis is a Jamaican-born photographer and publisher who has lived in London since the 1950s. 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.
Blake Andrews is an American street photographer and blogger based in Eugene, Oregon. Andrews was a member of the In-Public street photography collective.
Black Cultural Archives (BCA) 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.
Mark Sealy MBE 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 lecturer at the University of East London. She also gives regular academic and artist presentations nationally and internationally.
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.
TEN.8 was a British photography magazine founded in 1979 and published quarterly in Birmingham, England, throughout the 1980s, folding in 1992.
Howard Grey is a British photographer. He is known for his photographs of the arrival of the last West Indian migrants at Waterloo Station, London, before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 came into force.
