Upstairs, “The Blonde” occupies its own room. On one screen plays The Fairest (1998), a video of interviews with people who are fascinated with going blonde: literally and symbolically. Gregory as interviewer is unseen; her English-accented delivery, flat, automated, clinical, uncanny as she questions her interview subject on the social labor, aspiration, and performance of appearing to be towheaded. Gregory’s clever questioning technique elicits from her interviewees idealized and personal associations that reveal why they are choosing to alter her hair color. A wall of photographs of transformed blondes, women of diverse races, are arranged in latticed grids, recalling retro film reels. Another display continues Gregory’s taxonomic proclivities: a vitrine of blond hair types, and paraphernalia, staging whiteness as labor and racialized aspiration.
Further on, Gallery III focuses on Gregory’s interest in language extinction. “Language is also a place of struggle,” insisted bell hooks in her 1989 book Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, a dictum Gregory takes as a life project. In “Memory and Skin” (1998), she documents efforts to preserve Caribbean Creole and other various, Indigenous languages. In “Kalahari”(2005–10), attention turns to South Africa’s N|uu language, declared extinct in 1974 under Apartheid but later rediscovered by land‑claim activists. “Sites of Africa” (2001–06) documents London sites once resonant with African tongues. In Gomera (2009), her focus is El Silbo, the whistled language of La Gomera in Spain. If these videos are straightforward, seemingly artless, the legitimizing imperative here is to memorialize, bear witness.
The final work of the show, Little or no breeze (2021), extends her acts of witnessing to historical systems of knowledge, interleaving archival texts with her own somber, performative presence. In one scene, she sits on a staircase, head in hand, suggesting lament; in another, she gazes out a window. These staged stills are subtly animated to suggest motion and are accompanied by a score reminiscent of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, with expressive violin passages, tonal piano shifts, and other phrasal shifts that reinforce the work’s emotional cadence. Time and again throughout Catching Flies With Honey, Gregory wields message, material, and method to assert both seduction and authority, allure and command. She stages the private versus the public, personal versus collective. This show reaffirms Gregory as one Britain’s most inventive photographer-alchemists, a master of technique and vision.