Handsworth is an inner-city area of Birmingham in the West Midlands, England. Historically in Staffordshire, Handsworth lies just outside Birmingham City Centre and near the town of Smethwick.
Richard Billingham is an English photographer and artist, film maker and art teacher. His work has mostly concerned his family, the place he grew up in the West Midlands, but also landscapes elsewhere.
An Eye On X (Daybreak), 1995, is a short film produced and directed by Pogus Caesar, about the Birmingham micro sculptor Willard Wigan.
The culture of Birmingham is characterised by a deep-seated tradition of individualism and experimentation, and the unusually fragmented but innovative culture that results has been widely remarked upon by commentators. Writing in 1969, the New York-based urbanist Jane Jacobs cast Birmingham as one of the world's great examples of urban creativity: surveying its history from the 16th to the 20th centuries she described it as a "great, confused laboratory of ideas", noting how its chaotic structure as a "muddle of oddments" meant that it "grew through constant diversification". The historian G. M. Young – in a classic comparison later expanded upon by Asa Briggs – contrasted the "experimental, adventurous, diverse" culture of Birmingham with the "solid, uniform, pacific" culture of the outwardly similar city of Manchester. The American economist Edward Gleason wrote in 2011 that "cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution", concluding: "wandering these cities ... is to study nothing less than human progress."
Break In The Seal: The Photographs of Pogus Caesar and Vanley Burke was a photographic exhibition held 23 August – 21 September 1986 at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Jordan Well, Coventry, by two United Kingdom artists: Pogus Caesar, born in St Kitts, and Vanley Burke from Jamaica. Both came to the United Kingdom from the West Indies as children and have spent most of their lives in Birmingham, where they were educated and still work.
Respect was a seven-part documentary television series featuring some of the biggest names in British sport and was broadcast each Sunday at 5.00pm on Central Independent Television during November/December 1995.
Handsworth Riots – Twenty Summers On is the name of an exhibition of photographs taken by Birmingham film maker and photographer Pogus Caesar during and in the wake of the Handsworth Riots, 9–11 September 1985.
British Afro-Caribbean people are an ethnic group in the United Kingdom. They are British citizens whose recent ancestors originate from the Caribbean, and further trace their ancestry back to Africa or they are nationals of the Caribbean who reside in the UK. There are some self-identified Afro-Caribbean people who are multi-racial. The most common and traditional use of the term African-Caribbean community is in reference to groups of residents continuing aspects of Caribbean culture, customs and traditions in the UK.
Sir Horace Shango Ové was a Trinidadian-born British filmmaker, photographer, painter and writer based in London, England. One of the leading black independent filmmakers to emerge in Britain in the post-war period, Ové was the first black British filmmaker to direct a feature-length film, Pressure (1976). In its retrospective documentary 100 Years of Cinema, the British Film Institute (BFI) declared: "Horace Ové is undoubtedly a pioneer in Black British history and his work provides a perspective on the Black experience in Britain."
Gavin Jantjes is a South African painter, curator, writer and lecturer.
Sir John Akomfrah is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films".
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.
The second Handsworth riots took place in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, West Midlands, from 9 to 11 September 1985. The riots were reportedly sparked by the arrest of a man near the Acapulco Cafe, Lozells and a police raid on the Villa Cross public house in the same area. Hundreds of people attacked police and property, looting and smashing, even setting off fire bombs.
Hurvin Anderson is a British painter.
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.
John Myers is a British landscape and portrait photographer and painter. Between 1973 and 1981 he photographed mundane aspects of middle class life in the centre of England—black and white portraits of ordinary people and suburbia within walking distance of his home in Stourbridge.
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 co-founder of Choice FM, the first successful radio station granted a licence to cater for the black community in Britain.
Janine Wiedel is a documentary photographer and visual anthropologist. She was born in New York City, has been based in the UK since 1970, and lives in London. Since the late 1960s she has been working on projects which have become books and exhibitions. In the early 1970s she spent five years working on a project about Irish Travellers; in the late 1970s two years documenting the industrial heartland of Britain. Wiedel's work is socially minded, exploring themes such as resistance, protest, multiculturalism and counterculture movements.
Mahtab Hussain is a British fine art portrait photographer whose work comments on cultural differences. His bodies of work include You Get Me?, about issues of identity in working class British Asian young men and boys; Going Back Home to Where I Came From, photographs of Kashmir and Pakistan where his parents are from; and Honest With You about the changing identity of British Muslim women.
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.
