An undersung force in contemporary photography, Joy Gregory’s London retrospective delves into power structures, representation and cultural memoryOctober 10, 2025
In an essay for e-flux Journal titled Beauty Is a Method, writer and academic Christina Sharpe asks us to consider “what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible, how we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds.” In a new retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery, Catching Flies with Honey, artist and photographer Joy Gregory offers a compelling reply to Sharpe’s question. Gregory cultivates beauty in her practice through her focus and medium, both crucial to how she captures and maintains attention. “If you make work that is very beautiful that people want to look at, you can work with some very difficult subjects that the viewer may disagree with, but will engage with it regardless, due to its aesthetic value. I think that’s a seduction in itself,” the artist explains.
18Catching Flies with Honey by Joy Gregory
The title of the exhibition, which borrows from the proverb ‘you catch more flies with honey than vinegar’ that Gregory’s mother would often repeat, reflects this visual seduction that the artist employs. Sometimes the artist’s interest in beauty, a means of creating a sensuous experience, is more oblique and can be found in the laborious, embodied and physical experience of creating an image through cyanotypes, salt-printing or hours in the darkroom.
“I’ve always been really interested in the materiality of photography, and thinking of photographs as objects rather than just as images, because the substance the image exists on can be just as crucial as the image itself. When I’m using Victorian processes, such as with my series of cyanotypes or using Liquid Light, I have to use different types of paper which imbue the photographs with different emotions and feelings that make them into these really beautiful and precious objects,” Gregory says.
Other times, beauty and femininity, which are often defined by racialised and gendered ideas, become the site of analysis. This is especially apparent in earlier work, such as Autoportrait (1990), Cinderella Tours Europe (1997–2001) and Objects of Beauty (1992–1995). In one of her most recognisable series, Autoportrait, which consists of nine black and white self-portraits, Gregory poses for the camera with intention; sometimes peering over her shoulder, looking directly at the lens or with only her earlobe adorned with a dangly pendant earring in frame. This series is Gregory’s response to the lack of Black women in British fashion imagery, which she surrounded herself with growing up, and her desire to see someone like herself in the glossy pages of a magazine.
Bridge of Miracles, Venice from the series ‘Cinderella Tours Europe’ 1997 – 2001© Joy Gregory/ Courtesy the artist & DACS
For Gregory, who came of age as a Black woman in Buckinghamshire in the 1970s, surrounded by white families, fashion and beauty were not trite preoccupations but a place to dream and discover her sense of self. “Young people are obsessed with fashion and style because they want attention and to be noticed, but conform to some extent so they do not stand out massively,” Gregory says. “I spent most of my youth utterly obsessed with those magazines and with fashion. So much of my work is interested in these themes of fashioning oneself and how that plays with identity and even notions of race.”
This longstanding interest materialises in projects such as Girl Thing (2002–2004), a row of pearls, silk scarves, bathing suits and chiffon blouses are displayed as cyanotypes encased in a glass-like surface, reflecting, in this case literally, how femininity is a performance bound up in objects rather than something innate. In the gallery space upstairs, Gregory’s The Blonde (1997-2010) – a 13-year project which includes a film from 1998 titled The Fairest, images of blonde subjects photographed by the artist and a vitrine with photographs of the artist hawking blonde memorabilia at Brixton Market, amongst other ephemera – continues this exploration of how the self is constructed and uses the archetypal figure of the blonde to question racialised ideas of beauty. Gregory says she wanted to “collide the world of politics and fashion together”.
The latter half of the show introduces the audience to a new turn in Gregory’s work and the artist’s interest in performance, sound and moving image. These later works, which emerged from years of research, concern indigeneity in South Africa and the loss of language as well as a more personal exploration of the fractured relationship between the Caribbean and Europe. In Seeds of Empire (2021), for instance, Gregory uses moving image, text and sound produced in collaboration with the composer, Philip Miller, to problematise the exploration and findings by scientists and collectors that constituted the foundation of museums such as The British Museum.
 from the series ‘The Invisible Life Force of Plants’ 2020)
Schinus Molle (California Pepper Tree) from the series ‘The Invisible Life Force of Plants’ 2020© Joy Gregory/ Courtesy the artist & DACS
“Seeds of Empire was at least ten years in the making, and it started with me being invited to be a part of a research group that was looking at the collections in the British Museum, British Library and the Natural History Museum. There was this expectation that I would produce work quickly, but I was dealing with something that doesn’t just affect people of colour but all of us, because these collections reveal so much about colonialism and who colonised these spaces. There is no black and white answer to it,” Gregory explains.
“A lot of time, reading, reflection, speaking and thinking goes into approaching something like that, but when it does come together, it is truly wonderful. I asked Philip Miller to collaborate with me on the project and did all the interviews remotely with people who’d experienced coming into the UK from Jamaica and based it on just two pieces of text from Hans Sloane’s voyage to Jamaica, which both Philip and I knew inside out because we’d spent years and years reading that text.”
Gregory’s sustained engagement and deep understanding of the people she collaborates with and their histories are crucial to understanding her work, which is poetic, beautiful, and even minimalistic at first glance, yet attempts to engage with decades-long discourses on race and gender as well as the more haunting, problematic history of the British Empire.
Eyelashes from the series ‘Objects of Beauty’ 1992 – 1995© Joy Gregory/ Courtesy the artist & DACS
Her retrospective can at times feel like more of a conversation rather than a definitive survey, offering a moment to be entangled in Gregory’s ideas, bubbling beneath the beautiful surface. The works speak to each other as much as they speak to us, as Gregory explains. “The most important part of putting together this show was going through drawers and bringing things out of attics and public collections, and compiling the archive, because a lot of the work I’ve made or sometimes forgot I made, I have now realised relates to the work I made later. When you’re moving from one job to the next, one project to the next, it’s very hard to appreciate your practice for what it is. Seeing all of the work together like that shows how the exhibition is about these connections and how my work is part of an ongoing conversation.”
Catching Flies with Honey by Joy Gregory is on show at Whitechapel Gallery in London until 1 March 2026.