{"id":152208,"date":"2025-09-18T07:40:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T07:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/152208\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T07:40:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T07:40:06","slug":"photographer-joy-gregory-on-her-new-project-decades-in-the-making-a-lot-of-people-i-worked-with-on-it-have-died-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/152208\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer Joy Gregory on her new project, decades in the making: \u2018A lot of people I worked with on it have died\u2019 | Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"

There weren\u2019t many Black students at the Royal College of Art<\/a> when Joy Gregory was a student in the 1980s, but she did study alongside artist and Blk Art Group founder Keith Piper, who was putting together a Black photography exhibition. \u201cHe asked me if I would submit some work,\u201d says the 65-year-old artist.<\/p>\n

Piper had liked her work, which explored themes of colonialism, beauty, gender and race. However, her submission was rejected by the organisers on the basis that it simply wasn\u2019t Black enough. \u201cYou have to recognise the political climate at that time around practice and making a mark and I was basically taking pictures of flowers,\u201d says Gregory. \u201cFor me, you have the right to make whatever work you want. By shutting down what can and cannot be, you start to censor yourself. I was a bit pissed off, thinking: why should you pander to what people think you should be and sit within the box that they\u2019ve created?\u201d<\/p>\n

Understanding the capabilities of photography has always been of great importance to Gregory, who was given the \u00a3110,000 Freelands award in 2023. It\u2019s a journey that began by experimenting with lots of self-portraits. Her 1990 work Autoportrait is perhaps what she is best known for. It\u2019s a set of nine individual black-and-white self-portraits, each one uniquely angled. \u201cI think for years people thought that was the only work I had ever made,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Gregory\u2019s body of work spans media ranging from still life to portraiture to film to textiles and explores identity, cultural memory and linguistic traditions. More than 250 of her works will be on display at her retrospective Catching Flies With Honey<\/a> at London\u2019s Whitechapel Gallery from October. Visitors to the show can expect to see series such as The Blonde, which examines Eurocentric ideas of beauty and Language of Flowers, inspired by the Victorians\u2019 symbolic use of flowers to communicate messages.<\/p>\n

She\u2019ll also be debuting a piece that has taken two decades to make. \u201cThe new commission, if I ever manage to pull it off, looks at research I\u2019ve been doing since 2003 on endangered languages. I\u2019ve been working with a single community and family for over 20 years. A lot of people that I worked with on it have died, and they expected something to happen eventually, so it was important to have some sort of object to show to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Bicester in England in 1959 to Jamaican parents, Gregory was creative from a young age. She painted, drew, made clothes and read at least one book a day. \u201cWe lived near a bindery, so when the company would throw books out that had mistakes, they would end up in a dumpster and I would pick those books out and sit and read them.\u201d She got her first camera for her 18th birthday, which she says cost her family \u201call the money that they ever had\u201d.<\/p>\n

Gregory\u2019s dreams have always been simple: \u201cMy aspirations were about making good work.\u201d Since the early days, she has prioritised innovation. Be it cyanotype or salt printing, photography techniques are as important as the subject matter in creating a memorable, singular image. \u201cWith digital, everything can be absolutely perfect all the time. But I\u2019m interested in the idea of human intervention,\u201d says Gregory. \u201cEach one of these prints being unique and not repeatable. The perfection becomes about the human touch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joy to the world: five works from the WhitechapelJoy Gregory\u2019s Manuel Pina: Portraits from Memory and Skin, 1998. Photograph: Joy Gregory<\/p>\n

Memory and Skin, 1998
\u201cMemory and Skin was the first major commission that I had. It was about exploring the relationship between Europe and the Caribbean. Having grown up in a Caribbean family in Europe, you become bilingual, bicultural. It was about being able to look between the two, [and explore] people\u2019s assumptions about Europe and what they thought of the Caribbean.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Fairest, 1999 (main image)
\u201cI got on to the idea of: why would anyone want to become blond? I chose some people from European and non-European backgrounds to talk about what it was like being blond and that became the film The Fairest.\u201d<\/p>\n

A contact sheet from Joy Gregory\u2019s The Blonde. Photograph: Joy Gregory<\/p>\n

The Blonde, 1997\u20132010
\u201cIn 1998, there were suddenly a lot of non-European people with blond hair,\u201d says Gregory. \u201cBe they from Asia, Africa or the Caribbean, they were turning the notion of what it is to be a blond on its head. Blond had always been seen as something very European, but it was also about being an object of desire, feeding into the whole Marilyn Monroe thing. There were furious rants on chatrooms about these people betraying their race, but they were playing with the idea of being able to choose your identity, which was really fascinating.\u201d<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n

The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n

Joy Gregory\u2019s The Handbag Project: Hessian Bag, 1998. Photograph: Joy Gregory<\/p>\n

The Handbag Project, 1998-present
\u201cThese are handbags I brought back from South Africa. When I got back to London, I just wanted to do something very physical, and salt printing is a really interesting process. You coat the paper with salt, dry it, then coat it with silver nitrate. Each time you make a print, it would be a surprise when you put it out in the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joy Gregory\u2019s Language of Flowers, 1993. Photograph: Joy Gregory<\/p>\n

Language of Flowers, 1992-2004
\u201cThe reason for using cyanotype for Language of Flowers is because it was Victorian language and a Victorian process. [English botanist and photographer] Anna Atkins used cyanotypes and photography, and put plants on to sensitive paper as a way of recording what was present in the world at that time. Everything is so fragile, and it\u2019s interesting how we\u2019re always looking for permanence as a way of holding on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Catching Flies With Honey <\/a>is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, from 8 October to 1 March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There weren\u2019t many Black students at the Royal College of Art when Joy Gregory was a student in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-152208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}